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Since its official opening to developers, Facebook has undergone a tremendous growth, making it one of the most popular web operating systems over the Internet as well as a widely known brand, comparable to the big ones such as Google or Ebay. 

All this popularity around Facebook, for many one of the best services to build your business network (honestly, I disagree with this), led to impressive numbers: 20.000 applications, 70 million active users, 140 new apps per day.

After one years since the launch of Facebook platform, they officially announced the availability of Facebook Open Platform. In a nutshell, Facebook in a ZIP file, to be installed and used in your own environment. 

According to Facebook, this is a way to give back to the millions of developers who contributed to the huge success of one of he most popular social networks on the web.

On the anniversary of our platform launch, we want to give back to the developer community. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, we’ve been hearing from a lot of you that you’d like more tools and better information on how Facebook Platform actually works. As a starting point, we’re open-sourcing a significant part of Facebook Platform, including most of the code that runs Facebook Platform plus implementations of many of the most-used methods and tags. This release is just a first step in providing you a look into Facebook Platform, and we hope you’ll help us iterate on and improve it. You can find more information and the Facebook Open Platform downloads on our Facebook Open Source page athttp://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php.

This is definitely a very important move that have several implications we will slowly face in the short term.

First of all, as others highlight, this is a move to compete with OpenSocial, the open platform launched by Google that has several partners onboard already (AOL, Yahoo etc.). 

The other implication I see is the ability to build and install applications that can be used in a private environment, such as enterprises and other networks of companies, leveraging the power of Facebook for closed social networks. 

Finally, even if Facebook says that it’s a way to give back to the developers community, it’s also a way to get much more from them. The power of open source comes from the contribution of millions of developers all over the world and all this effort can lead to improvements to the core Facebook platform that we haven’t thought of yet (neither them, I think). 

Ok, let’s go back to our new internal “wiki, address book, forums, blogs etc.”, http://myfacebook.abbeynet.com.

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