While the move was a nice gesture to the development community, it's not as if Facebook did this without a purpose. Specifically, they hope Tornado will get more websites connected to Facebook using higher-speed connections.
MySpace is probably looking to get the same result from Qizmt, MySpace's MapReduce framework. In an interesting (and possibly reactionary) move, the company open-sourced the code behind the environment, which powers technology such as MySpace's "People You May Know" feature.
What's a MapReduce framework, anyway? MySpace explains that, as well as the benefits of Qizmit, in an announcement earlier today:
MapReduce environments are used by sites with large amounts of data, such as Google and Amazon. Similarly, MySpace’s millions of users consume and produce video, music and other content every minute, which constantly results in very large sets of new data. Qizmt can process both data generated by our users (active data) and data generated by our analytics system (passive data) and transform it into meaningful recommendations virtually in real-time. This will support the discoverability of new entertainment experiences across music, videos, friends and more.
There could be a lot of useful applications of this technology, but just like Facebook, MySpace hopes that it will get companies connecting to MySpace more often. Who will use the newly released code and how they will use it remains to be seen.