Facebook is the Online Social Platform

We live in an amazing time. Because of the World Wide Web, people today exist in a networked marketplace. People are not just networked to their information. They are networked to each other.

Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook has quickly become one of the most popular social networking applications on the World Wide Web. According to a recent article in VentureBeat, Facebook gets 1.5 billion page views a day. Facebook is becoming the defacto standard for staying connected with your various relationships in your community.

Facebook isn’t going to be going away any time soon, the fate that most are expecting of MySpace. This is because Facebook has decided to be more then the online representation of the relationships within your social network. Facebook is a platform for conversations within an online community to take place.

Last year, Facebook released an API so that programmers could take advantage of and build upon what Facebbok was offering. This is exciting.

So many social Web applications have been built lately. I can’t even start to name all of the different user accounts that I have signed up for lately. I can’t even start to name all the time times I have had to re-enter all of my different friends into these social networks.

Facebook knows who 90% of my friends are. Why should I try and reinvent the wheel? Why not just build upon Facebook’s existing platform.

Just think how much better Twitter could be. Instead of having to convince all of my friends to sign up for a new service. All they would have to do is use their Facebook account. All of their information would be there and all of the information about who their friends are would be there too.

Is there something scary about having one organization that is so in control of your social network and relationship information? Isn’t this kind of like everyone storing their digital identity with Microsoft via the MSN Passport? It really didn’t fly. Do we need an OpenID-like thing for not just describing you but describing your online community?