The other week, when representatives from Facebook mentioned that they'd be open-sourcing significant portions of their platform, I hazarded a guess that they would be providing at most a set of APIs. Now that Facebook's actually released some code under the aegis of the Facebook Open Platform, I had a look-see. To my delight, I saw more than just APIs.

Facebook's latest moves to control the heart of the Web are worrying many people. Luckily, Mozilla has just announced a new Firefox project to manage identity that may be just what we need: a free software alternative to Facebook's plans. Will the next big battle between open and closed be fought between Firefox and Facebook?

"Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us."

Last night we performed an update on Filmaster.com bring one big new feature and many minor bug fixes. The big new one is obviously Facebook Connect integration. In order to make this integration happen we used the Facebook API for Facebook Connect (mostly JavaScript with FbSQL queries).

It's probably not true to say that everybody hates Facebook. But there are many millions (of the hundreds of millions that use the site) that claim to hate Facebook's cavalier approach to privacy and founder Mark Zuckerberg's equally vague approach to the future of our privacy. There are even groups dedicated to encouraging users to leave Facebook (some on Facebook itself, ironically).

PHP team had been brought to Facebook's main campus. That team were forced to sign NDA's, and taken to a very quiet, secluded meeting room where some cool new Facebook-backed open source project was described.

If anyone tells you open source can't run a large business or scale, remind them that Facebook is serving a half billion people with a network built on open source code. Quite a bit of it, as Developer.com notes, much of what runs Facebook is open source languages and software.

On Tuesday, Facebook is expected to unveil changes to PHP, the language that helped make the social networking site a success - along with millions of other web sites. SD Times has outed the planned change here. Facebook wouldn't provide details when contacted by The Reg but said it would make more details available Tuesday morning, Pacific time.

Microsoft has integrated Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook, bringing the newsfeeds of millions of Facebook users into inboxes across the world.