The blogisphere is firing today with posts like Glyn Moody's in Computer World UK. It appears Facebook is poised to release its development platform under an open source license as early as this week. Most see this as a direct response to competitive pressure coming from Open Social. Facebook's involvement in an open, collaborative approach to the data portability issue would be most welcome.

Common APIs make an important difference in our ability, as a community driven project, to stay connected. Absent common approaches, the significant effort Chalet invested in Facebook integration for Joomla! must be repeated for each and every social networking environment. Instead, Open Social holds promise for a common approach to sharing data and applications with social networks, such as Orkut, MySpace, Ning, Hi5, and iGoogle, and any other platform that agrees to collaborate and interface in this fashion.

Even in his application for the Google Summer of Code, Shannon identified Chalet's Facebook project as an important effort to consider in his work. I applaud Shannon and Chalet for connecting with one another and for planning how their work can be compatible and result in the very best for the Joomla! community. Considering the common good and working together *does* produce better results and is the reason that open source solutions are able to impact positive change, even with giants like Facebook.