Facebook just open sourced their Facebook Open Platform (fbOpen), a snapshot of the infrastructure that runs the Facebook Platform. It includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags.

According to the release - We hope this release is a starting point to help you more easily debug and optimize your applications, build tools that will help other developers and strengthen the ecosystem as a whole, and generally understand Facebook Platform more deeply.

Making their API’s open in source form will help other social platforms to build applications and interfaces that will be compatible with Facebook. This appears to be a direct attempt against OpenSocial, the google backed initiative towards open social networks. However, as of this announcement, currently no social networks are lined up for fbOpen as of yet.

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