"We're not selling anything today, but we do hope to benefit from this primarily in the area of accelerating innovation," said Frank Frankovsky, director of hardware design at Facebook. "That's the reason we're doing it - to drive efficiency for ourselves and then to benefit others."

Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with the Yankee Group, said the fact that Facebook has enough clout to drive hardware innovation and to design something significant enough to share with the rest of the industry says a lot about how far the company has come from the start-up it was just a few years ago.

"If anybody still doubted the validity of social networking, this kind of takes care of that," he added. "Facebook has so much power that they can now change the direction of computing... Today was a good example of Facebook having clout and getting out there and using it."

Facebook has been coming into its own. Last fall, Zuckerberg and Facebook's inception were the focus of a major motion picture, . And just last month, Forbes announced that Zuckerberg and five others involved with Facebook made the magazine's .

Long eclipsing social networking , Facebook moved on to bigger challengers.