Techcrunch reports this morning that Facebook might be on the verge of “open sourcing” their platform, in response to the rise of OpenSocial, the other major social network platform standard.

Techcrunch adds:

Bebo already licenses the Facebook Platform, which allows third parties to make their Facebook applications work on Bebo, too. With the new announcement, social networks won’t need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook. They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform – FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.

What it means: the arrival of another open source social network platform standard means that, if you’re thinking of building social tools within your site, you should not re-invent the wheel. Look at OpenSocial, at Facebook or even at DiSo and embrace one of those.

Update: you can add me as a friend on Facebook here.

Update2 (05/28/2008): Facebook confirms the rumor.

Update 3 (06/03/2008): you can download the Facebook Open Platform here. (via Techcrunch)