Social-networking site Facebook is opening up part of its platform. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said Monday that it will form what it described as “a significant part” of its platform open source.

The platform, one year old last week, has led to the development more than 24,000 applications created by outside developers for its community of users, Facebook said. “We see about 140 applications added to our directory per day,” said Facebook’s Ami Vora in a posting on the Facebook developers blog.

Giving Back

In order to “give back to the developer community,” Vora continued, Facebook is making the platform itself open source, including most of the cipher and the most-used methods and tags. The announced goals of fbOpen, as the open-source part of the platform is being called, are to help developers more easily build applications, run experiment servers, and optimize cipher. With extensibility points, developers can add functionality to the platform.

Many observers are saying

that a key reason for that move is Facebook’s ongoing struggle with Google’s OpenSocial. OpenSocial establishes a standard set of application-programming interfaces, or APIs, which allow outside developers to create an application that, with only a few modifications, can run on all OpenSocial-supported sites.

OpenSocial is supported by Yahoo, AOL and MySpace, as well as LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, Nine and Google’s social network, Orkut. Makers of business software, such as Salesforce.com and Oracle, are plus supporting OpenSocial so outside developers can add applications to their platforms. Developers of some of the most popular Facebook applications have said they will support OpenSocial.

‘Coming In From the Cold’

Platform open-sourcing “is Facebook coming in from the cold,” said Laura DiDio, an analyst with research firm Yankee Group. She added that it’s clearly a response to the OpenSocial initiative, and they “had to do it or become increasingly marginalized.”

The struggle with…

Orginal post by Top Tech News