A friend in the valley clued me into a juicy bit of gossip that I have been unable to confirm or yet uncover. Perhaps y'all can help. I've heard that a whole gaggle of PHP core developers were invited to Facebook's offices today to discuss some grand new open-source project from Facebook. The company has already opened a number of projects, including Hive, a data-access layer for Hadoop.
But I'm as yet unable to uncover the actual nature of this new project. Considering the PHP developers being called to the scene, I'd imagine this has much more to do with the Facebook presentation layer than with its back end. We already know the back end is producing a ton of data, and that Facebook's biggest challenge is to make heads or tails of all that information. Hence their use and development of Hadoop-based solutions to the problem.
PHP is certainly the underpinnings of Facebook's presentation side. Does this mean we're about to see Facebook open its platform?