Facebook to go for open source?

Since last year, there are news about Facebook, the famous social networking website founded by Mark Zuckerberg is going for open source. The latest update is that they are currently working on an open source initiative that is meant to help application developers to better understand their Facebook developer platform and to be more easily build applications, whether it's by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications.

This is seen to be a respond to the Google OpenSocial platform, which is currently widely implemented in many social networking websites, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

This initiative is expected to boost the interoperability between Facebook and other social networking websites. Application developers will then be able to easily port their Facebook applications over to other social networking websites, which in turn can help Facebook Platform, which comprises of FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API, to become a standard.

Another potential benefit of going open source is that, outside developers could work on the codes, make contribution and help to improve the Facebook Platform itself.