Last night I wrote an article about Reddit’s big announcement party and the Tagging feature I discovered a little early. It turns out the feature “was the result of a prank, but we suspect tags will be one of the first features developed…”

Tonight is the announcement party where Reddit was supposed to deliver a surprise announcement. However, for some reason they have decided to release their surprise early through a video featuring the Reddit alien and a huge message.

1. Reddit can benefit from faster development - Since the site is mainly run by the users, this will give the user more power to help in the developement of Reddit.com.

2. Increased transparency - Reddit has always been one of the most transparent social media communities and yet they still want to be more transparent.

3. Love for Open Source Communty - Reddit just feels a true love for the open source community and feel they owe it to that community to be open. Claiming that much of Reddit comes from the open source community they feel an need to give back what they have built.

Reddit’s new development site was also put up this morning at .

“Here you can download the code, participate in the forum, and help maintain our documentation wiki. As you can see, documentation is a little skimpy at the moment… that will improve.”

It should be only a matter of time until someone finds a way to incorporate the Reddit code into a Wordpress plugin so you can have your own Reddit like section on your blog… hint hint.

My initial concerns where that people would have access to enough information about Reddit that they could spam or game it but Reddit had this to say, “there are a few portions of the code that we’re keeping to ourselves, mostly related to anti-cheating/spam protection.”

reddit-open Reddit Goes Open Source picture

So why announce the surprise announcement before the announcement event even starts?

“We liked announcing before (the event) because no one pays attn at events with free beer :”

Makes perfect sense to me.

I will still head out to the event tonight to drink beer and celebrate this ground breaking news.