As we wrote last week, Facebook is turning parts of its application platform open source, the company announced today. It’s available here for download.
This comes a little more than a year after Facebook Platform first launched to allow third party developers a way to get their applications directly onto Facebook. The company says more than 24,000 applications have now been built on the platform and more than 400,000 developers are building these applications. 140 new applications are added to the directory each day. “Nearly all” Facebook users have added at least one of those applications.
Facebook Open Platform is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), except for the FBML parser, which includes Mozilla source code, which is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).
Facebook says they’re doing this “to give back to the developer community.” That may be somewhat true, but the key reason for fbOpen is to compete with OpenSocial, the Google/MySpace/Yahoo/AOL led open source competitor to Facebook Platform.
Competing social networks, including the still-larger MySpace, are lining up against Facebook via OpenSocial. This is their way of responding.
It may be too late. Tellingly, Facebook was unable to line up any partners to add to today’s announcement, although some social networks we’ve chatted with say they will almost certainly implement it in the near future.
More details here.
Hhhhmmmm … dont know where FB is heading …..
but seems interesting …. lets see
Wow. What an exciting time we live in. Thank you Facebook for releasing your code and allowing us developers the opportunity to be a part of this revolutionary platform.
Doesnt really mean anything to me til other sites adopt FBopen. Ive already spent money developing for opensocial
http://techriti...se-of-business/
This is an interesting move. Maybe this will lead to more open social networks or closed social networks. I’m not really sure if it was done to compete with OpenSocial…
Would be interesting to see if they manage to set up an alternative ecosystem to OpenSocial. Just open sourcing the platform will not be enough to gain social network partners. They would have to adopt a federated network architecture with identity portability, not just application portability.
As much as FB was highly innovative with their Platform approach this is simply copying your competition. And it never spells anything good if you don’t throw in some extra juice (meaning your copy is innovative as well). Actually, it looks just for what it is: a competition struggle.
Facebook guys mentioned about opesourcing the platform during the developer garage last thu .. sounds interesting…
They want developers to know the internals of the API and build better Apps
Great post,…….This is an interesting move.
cool, site back up very quickly
unrelated. @ Michael . This is the Twitter karma.
Nice, but this isn’t actually open source is it?
‘Open’ is becoming to Tech compaines as ‘Green’ is to automakers, doesn’t always apply but they like to throw it around a lot for PR’s sake.
i didn’t add, not anyone i know did.
Funding: $493M
Whenever I see that it both amazes AND makes me want to puke
Wow, thats a shitload of funding!
BRAAAAAGH! (textual puking, for the uninitiated)
Whoa!
BRRRAAAAAAAAH!
I have a feeling this won’t matter much. Social networks are dying down again. The ‘fad’ has passed. They’ve definately changed things and are a useful utility but it doesn’t mean it’s a business.
facebook wants developers to do all the innovation
This looks like they just cobbled together a bunch of stuff and dumped it on the community, rather than writing a reference platform for the FB apis, providing a container out of the box.
What’s their pitch anyway to container developers (not app developers)? Don’t implement OpenSocial, implement FB instead so you can strengthen the FB platform, increasing the chance that we’ll dominate and kill your container in the future? MySpace, Yahoo, hi5, et al, are not really afraid of Orkut or iGoogle eating their lunch anytime soon. But it makes no sense for the current social networks to assist Facebook as they are more of a direct primary threat.
@Ryan Merket, you are a mouthpiece fanboy for FB. Thank you blah blah blah? I’d expect someone to say that at a convention as a PR move, but in comments?
I don’t know why, but at this time Facebook platform still looks like the most mature entity out there. Why? Well I believe that OpenSocial is nothing more than a marketing approach rather than a powerful feature.
What was the benefit from joining OpenSocial ? None, I think… except for Google. Well with this new open approach, huge developer community and all this big user base Facebook may manage something great.
Firs of all I want to say that innovation is no more a common term at Google, but instead – the marketing and activities from Facebook are more and more dynamic and interesting.
I wish them the best and kudos for this new feature.
@17
Thanks for the choice words Anonymous.
“What’s their pitch anyway to container developers (not app developers)?”
There is no pitch to container developers — imagine that. They actually want to be more transparent to developers, is that really that hard to believe?
“But it makes no sense for the current social networks to assist Facebook as they are more of a direct primary threat.”
Again, this is not a call out for containers to start jumping ship. Please read the release notes for fbOpen before making assumptive comments.
This amps up the “big dog” battle between Facebook and Google with fbOpen and OpenSocial. I wrote an article that outlines how this is eerily similar to the Microsoft vs. Sun (and its Java Community Process) battle of the past.
http://connolly...ch/label/BigDog
@Ryan,
If its not about container developers, why are they talking about writing extensions to FBML, FQL, etc? More transparent to developers? They had a long time to release source and could have been doing it from day 1 like Google does with all its new platforms, so I somehow doubt this has anything to do with transparency, and everything to do with trying to block the spread of Open Social.
Developers can’t ignore the 275M open social users, and they can’t ignore the rest of the world outside of the US, so no matter what, developers will have to write Open Social apps. There’s simply no way that the future of the social web is a single web site: Facebook. So either their pitch is an open platform for anyone to write FB containers, or, it’s an act of desperation.
The sites that want apps – would add both open social and facebook-apps.
Open’s open right? If not then how open is open? Can you be slightly open? Can you be fully open in some respects but not in others? Is this buzzword being abused?
What will it take for maximum cross compatibility with extreme data portability? A depreciated valuation? Gov’t intervention (like allowing mobile phone numbers to follow customers)?
I await the day where I can easily pack my bags and walk over to the service that provides the best features etc…
I’m so glad this went open. OpenSocial is a HUGE PAIN in the ass to develop for. The client services are difficult to use and making it work cross platform is as much as a pain as anything else. Just fetching friend data is a huge hassle, much less actually putting the data to use in any meaningful way without server-side assistance.
Add on top of that the fact that myspace’s open social services fail every 3rd call, leaving the user stranded… its awful.
Facebook is the clear winner here unless Myspace kicks it into gear.
@21 – No, there aren’t 275M opensocial users. There are only around 10-20M so far. Just because a platform like Orkut or Myspace adopts open social doesn’t mean that the penetration in their platform is 100%… more like 1%!
Take a look at how opensocial apps are growing… VERY slowly. Myspace is at a dead halt almost unless app developers are willing to pay them $150K for a featured advertisment.
@ThatGuy – On hi5 we have over 50% of our users have at least one app installed, and the median is 3 apps per user.
We have 30-40m uniques per month and 80m+ registered users.
Say what you will, but opensocial is a success on hi5, and we think it can and will be successful everywhere else.
opensource for Facebook is useful
Wait until Microsoft puts its brand behind Facebook. There is a whole business community behind corporate firewalls that isn’t allowed to socially network….
I am a fan of facebook. I am planing to resign from http://www.Richromances.com and go to facebook to find a match. There are many useful and interesting appl;ication
“To give back to the developer community”. Wow, how nice of them! (sarcasm)
That’s some seriously ugly code. My lead developer would slap me silly if I tried to check in code like that. Heh.
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