Fig 1. Social Graph Platform Wars by Dave McClure

News from the Facebook Developers:

"[We] want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins -- users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications."

Meanwhile--in fact, just a couple of hours ago--Inside Facebook posts live from the Bebo Platform Launch event to report Bebo CEO Michael Birch's announcement that "The Bebo Platform is almost totally compatible with the Facebook Platform: the APIs, markup language, and query language are all the same."

So developers who've created apps for Facebook can port the same apps to Bebo with minimal changes.

If you've been following the social networking space you'll recall that Google's OpenSocial initiative is designed to overcome this same challenge. Bebo itself joined OpenSocial back in November, a move that TechCrunch said at the time may have "checkmated" Facebook.

Check, but not mate. It'll be interesting to see how many other OpenSocial partners decide to take advantage of the newly-opened Facebook Platform Architecture.

(Via Jeremiah Owyang)