web

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about platforms and services as platforms. The recent strategy trend in start up companies seems to be: become a platform.

That’s what Twitter is doing, that’s what Facebook and every other social network is doing. You build an infrastructure and an API and you invite people to play on your system.

But the one thing to remember is that the web is the ultimate platform.

I keep seeing the exodus of Facebook features, one by one, to the native web. Twitter is enhanced, open, archive-able “status updates.” FriendFeed is trying to co-opt the News Feed (what I give credit for popularizing the idea of the lifestream) and bring it out onto the open web. In many ways it is succeeding.

I think it’s inevitable that online community is going to end up as a disparate set of open services that work together instead of a closed system (Facebook) that offers all services.

The future of social networking is that everyone has:

• a blog (profile + notes)
• FriendFeed (news feed)
• Twitter (status)
• flickR (photos)
• del.icio.us or Google (shared items)
• etc., etc.

The smart way to go about “building a platform” is not to build something on top the web that traps users and developers, but to build something within the web so that it connects with everything that’s already available.

What’s the difference?

Facebook sits on top of the web, and it relies on its users and its developers to be content with only a base level of interaction with the greater web. When you build a Facebook application, you’re building a Facebook application, not a web application.

It’s the difference between wearing a Starship Troopers exoskeleton and working out. The exoskeleton is really cool looking, polished, and lets you plug in all kinds of gears and gizmos. But you’re not actually any stronger than you were. And your muscles aren’t really connected to it, even though it’s responding to your push.

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As I’ve been fond of mentioning in my occasional online bio, I have either a knack for or an obsession with making pages look cleaner (and in my opinion, better). This is endlessly frustrating to me in an age when making an uglier page is somehow turning into a sign of success.

But one of the things that I have always liked about Facebook, especially over MySpace, is the organized, clean, you-can’t-screw-it-up look to the profile pages. Well, now that everyone can add as many applications as they like, you can certainly clutter the space.

So my problem has become this: how do I keep all of the awesome applications I like to sport, such as BlogTips, Google Reader Shared Items, Kyte.tv, Blog Friends…the list goes on. How do I keep them, and at the same time keep my profile from degenerating into an endless scroll bar?

I’ve figured out two tricks that help me out on this one.

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