The move comes in response to criticism that developers wouldn’t create applications for Facebook because the website is too “closed” to be an effective market, and sets up a potential clash between Facebook’s now open platform and OpenSocial, the open development platform initiative Google Inc. launched in November. Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora first posted the news in a blog entry on Wednesday.
Now we also 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 license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins — users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.
This is just another step toward the vision of easy, open sharing of information. We look forward to supporting other social sites as they release their own platforms, and look forward most of all to the added benefit for developers and users.
