Facebook
is releasing as open-source software parts of its application development platform in order to make it easier for programmers to create applications for the social-networking site, the company announced Monday.
Facebook will offer as
open source "most" of the code that runs its platform, plus implementations of its most popular methods and tags.
This is another step in Facebook's program for external developers, which it kicked off a little over a year ago when it opened up its platform to them. Since then, about 400,000 developers have created some 24,000 applications for Facebook.