Recently, the emerging world of social networking was hit by a new sensation, in a move that proved that although surprises are not very much in fashion anymore, they still haven’t lost their charm.

This week Facebook announced that its developer platform would be available to other social networking web sites. On Wednesday, the company’s Senior Platform Manager Ami Vora posted the following blog post: "[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," said Ami Vora and then added that a developer page elaborates that "the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work."

Surprisingly enough, the Palo Alto, California-based social networking web site called this move a natural one for the evolution of a constantly changing product. However, the most interesting part of the story is that Facebook managed to both keep this move a secret and to win Bebo on its side. Facebook’s announcement came at the same time with the popular British social network’s own announcement, which was making public the fact that Bebo modeled its platform directly on that of Facebook.

According to Ziv Navoth, Bebo’s Vice President of Marketing, Facebook started to cooperate with them only in the last few weeks, although Bebo had been working on this project for several months. Thus, Faceebook seems to have joined the emerging cult of openness and to release a statement that only two months ago would have sound extremely strange: “We’re glad to see Bebo take advantage of the work we've put into designing and building a complete, usable platform. […] Having similar platforms across multiple social sites is good for everyone: developers get more reach for their applications, social sites get more people developing for their site, and users have better experiences no matter where they are on the Web."

However, no matter how nice Facebook’s statements may sound, it is quite sure that the popular social networking web site was in fact forced to take these decisions. Google’s OpenSocial initiative is sort of a Sword of Damocles hanging above Facebook.

But, instead of making alliances, Facebook implemented its own, also hoping to make its critics stop claiming that the popular social networking web site is too “closed”.

Still, will the free world of existing social networking web sites be more successful than Google’s upcoming initiative?