Facebook opens up its Platform

Facebook has announced the architecture for its developer platform will be made available to other social networking sites, potentially rendering moot the criticism that its strategy is too "closed" - and possibly dealing a huge blow to Google's yet-to-launch OpenSocial initiative.

Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora wrote in a blog: "[We] want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we'll even licence the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms."

A developer page stated "the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work".

In the official wording from Facebook, the social network is "making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites" and sees this as the natural evolution of a constantly changing product.

This announcement comes in the wake of three OpenSocial partners - Bebo, Friendster and LinkedIn - all releasing their own developer platform initiatives independent of the Google-run program.

Bebo specifically designed its developer code to be compatible with Facebook's. Bebo is the first major social network to implement this new "open" platform code from Facebook.

A statement from Facebook said: "We're glad to see Bebo take advantage of the work we've put into designing and building a complete, usable platform. Having similar platforms across multiple social sites is good for everyone: developers get more reach for their applications, social sites get more people developing for their site, and users have better experiences no matter where they are on the web."

But the Facebook release stressed this is not any kind of special alliance. "No, this is not a collaboration or partnership with Bebo," the statement said. "A core Facebook principle is openness and access for everyone, so we've decided to enable any social sites to model their own platforms after Facebook Platform."

The initial launch of Facebook's developer platform in May sparked a frenzy of developer activity and interest in third-party contributions to social networks. Google announced OpenSocial months before it was ready. And some OpenSocial partners, like Plaxo, have already claimed OpenSocial has shown results.

But others are waiting until the code has proven itself stable - and that has meant OpenSocial is still largely a concept, not a concrete phenomenon.

Caroline McCarthy writes for CNET News.com