Facebook announced its new open platform this week, called F8. What company has done is invite third-party developers to create modules that plug right into the Facebook interface. Facebook.com has been a stellar web app for some time, but the new Facebook is less an application than it is a social-networking environment. As of this week, the Facebook API, Facebook query language, and Facebook markup language are all documented online. For political folks, F8's practical uses are pretty exciting. Facebook claims to have 24 million active users, half of whom login to the site every day. So module developers are diving into a giant pool of engaged users who really like to live out part of their lives onlines -- appealing for everyone from fundraisers to field organizers. I've been playing around with the new F8-enabled apps the last couple days. I started by adding Project Agape's "Causes" module and then joined the "Free DC" group that benefits DC Vote. If I had wanted to, I could make a micro-contribution (or macro-contribution, I guess) to the group right through Facebook.

The question of whether Facebook was going to stay a walled-garden has been answered with F8. As a somewhat stodgy Facebook user, I'll admit that I sighed just a bit over that. Early Facebook was somehow reassuring -- you knew exactly how it would behave. It always worked. The design was clean and consistant. F8 may make Facebook a bit of mess for a while. When twice I tried to add "Net Neutrality" through the Cause module yesterday, for example, Facebook just hung on a blank template page. ValleyWag says Facebook.com was completely shut down this morning.

With F8, Mark Zuckerberg et al have ceded complete control over the environment they built. I imagine that there are some folks wondering, why would anyone do that? For one thing, opening up a system can remove constraints that hinder growth. We're seeing something similar happen with Second Life. Linden Lab has made the call to open source the servers that run Second Life, giving up control over what they call "the Grid." Why would a for-profit company do that? For one reason, Linden's success has been hampered by Second Life's enormous technical needs. Each Linden-run server can only host a handful of avatars at a time. With the distributed server load, Second Life has the chance to grow as it should. The Facebook folks, I think, have other motivations. In return for opening the doors to their system, they get the opportunity to really see if their dorm-room creation can improve social and political life. I'm naive enough to believe that these guys want to change the world. We're talking about a 22 year-old CEO who said no to giant piles of cash so that he could see what his company could become.

There are going to be bumps in the road for Facebook, and F8 is a bit of a gamble. But I think what's exciting is this turn away from the assumption that systems work better when closed and controlled. They made a policy choice in favor of participation and then implemented it in their code. Facebook has set themselves as the anti-MySpace. MySpace is a closed system. It's difficult to port content into it or extract information our of it. MySpace's approach is to resist third-party apps, like when they accused PhotoBucket of offering embedable ad-sponsored Spiderman 3 slideshows. That's not overly surprising, considering that their business model has long been based on keeping users in their bounded universe and directing money spent in that universe towards the company itself. (And that was before Rupert Murdoch bought it...)

I'm resisting the urge to spot a trend. But I do think we're beginning to see more openness in everything from license agreements and to programming architectures. Larry Lessig recently spearheaded a campaign to free recordings of presidential debates so that we can remix and reuse that content. So far, FOX has said no but CNN has said yes and Lessig is working with NBC/MSNBC on their terms. And the Open House Project and activist Carl Malamud have worked with C-Span to get them to loosen up their grip on copyright just a bit. We're starting to see some big entities start make the decision that openness is a risk worth taking.