Facebook sent us the following statement this afternoon:

“We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem. Additional details will be released soon.”

I hadn’t thought about developers setting up their own test environments but this could be great. It also sounds as though this new initiative is for developers and not for commercial purposes. Rather than using the platform code to build your own social platform it is being used as a way to help developers build better applications. More details will most likely be released at the Facebook developers meeting later this week in Palo Alto. Techcrunch claims the new project is called “fbOpen.”