Opening up Facebook Platform Architecture

At Facebook, we’ve always recognized that social context is an essential part of providing a great experience for our users, and we’ve wanted our users to have the best social experience whether they were on our site or off. That’s why, back in August 2006, we released the Facebook Platform API – with that release, developers could incorporate the data users chose to share into their own sites or applications to give users a more social experience no matter where they were. With the launch of the most recent version of Facebook Platform in May 2007, we also opened up the Facebook website itself.

We’ve seen a great response from both our developers and our users, and we’ve certainly learned a lot as we’ve worked on our platform over the past year and a half.

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 to other platforms. 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.

You can find more information and additional technical details at http://developers.facebook.com/specification.php.

Thanks for developing!