Mike Arrington is reporting that Facebook will soon announce that they are open sourcing the Facebook platform. This will enable other social network sites to easily integrate platform features. It will also help the large social network sites to make tools which help to convert Facebook applications to be compatible with other platform standards such as OpenSocial.

Mike Arrington suggest that this is a response to OpenSocial. He also suggests that Facebook is being “out maneuvered by competitors” more recently. I definitely disagree with Arrington’s assertion that they are being out maneuvered and I also thing open sourcing the platform will help to eventually make social applications more transportable. The one downside of making the platform open source is that developers who integrate the platform into their own site will need to make regular updates as Facebook makes adjustments to their own platform.

This is an interesting move by Facebook. It will make the conversion process from social networking site to social platforms more efficient for third-party websites. It’s also yet another action which extends Facebook’s goal of becoming one of the standards on the social web.