OpenSocial 0.8 specs out - Facebook opensources big parts of its platform

It's funny but true. The same day OpenSocial 0.8 specs are out Facebook announces to Opensource its platform.

This is great news for developers on one side but bad news on the other: We still have to follow two standards if we want to build our applications for specific social Networks.

Bebo just "licensed" Facebook for its application API and on the other hand we have the powerful OpenSocial community.

We'll see who's going to win the battle - either Microsoft backed Facebook or the Google-Yahoo-AOL powered OpenSocial community. By the way I never understood how Microsoft thought that Yahoo would accept any offer as they are to much good friends with Google.

Facebook itself comments on the Opensourcing of big parts of its platform:

The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods. We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of – just as you showed off your creativity with Facebook Platform, we hope this lets you be creative with the foundation of the platform itself.

Full OpenSocial 0.8 specs

Download Facebook Open Platform

Facebook to open up its Platform as OpenSource?

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch says

Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us.

In his post from this tuesday, may 27th he further informs that

Bebo already licenses the Facebook Platform, which allows third parties to make their Facebook applications work on Bebo, too. With the new announcement, social networks won’t need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook. They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform - FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.

This is clearly the answer to fight Google-promoted OpenSocial initiative. We'll see if this will be a similar war as it was deliberated in the mid-late 90's when Microsoft -Behind Facebook as shareholder as you may know - introduced Internet explorer to fight the Netscape Web browser. what seems to be clear that the leading Social Network Services MySpace and Facebook will go on fighting for leadership.