• Joel Nichols
• May 28,2008
• In: Internet

Facebook To Go Open Source

It is rumoured that soon, possibly even this week, Facebook.com will be releasing their platform as open-source software, Tech Crunch tells us. The immidiate effect would be that many social networks could be formed from their CMS, as well as making it possible for other social networks to pick up their code, making it possible for Facebook applications to work on a variety of different social networks.

Bebo already licences the Facebook platform, allowing developers to easily port applications to Bebo. With this new announcement, however, it will become easy for social networks to implement features from Facebook into their social networks. This could mean that applications made for Facebook could work with any social network around the world.

If they were to go about this in a similar way to OpenSocial, third parties could easily modify the Facebook code for their own uses, allowing them to deploy them on their own sites. Of course, having these changes implemented in the official Facebook platform, would require Facebook’s approval.

Let’s see where this goes…

Source: TechCrunch