About a month ago, Facebook announced that it was acquiring FriendFeed.

Today the company announced it is open sourcing Tornado, a web server framework originally developed by the FriendFeed team. Tornado is designed to handle thousands of connections at the same time. As realtime updates continue to be an important feature of the social Web, developers can now leverage this powerful tool to more easily build and scale their realtime environments, a spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews. Back in March, Facebook introduced its realtime news feed, a concept that FriendFeed was also built upon.