the j. botter weblog

If there were any doubts as to what the best social networking service on the planet is, Facebook shattered them today with the announcement of the Facebook Platform.

Instead of closing up their system and forcing people to do business with them like MySpace has, Facebook has instead gone the opposite direction, building a new development platform for people to create applications on. The great thing is that there are no rules, so companies can build applications for Facebook users to utilize and monetize those apps however they choose, and Facebook won’t take a cut. They also have access to all Facebook user data, which means the new software will interact perfectly with Facebook profiles and your friends.

I’m not joking when I’m telling you that an entire industry will spring up around this platform and that fortunes will be made by people creating software for this thing.

I took a look at some of the apps currently available; they’re actually not available on Facebook profiles right now, but you can go to this special URL to get early access. They should all be available by the time you wake up tomorrow, anyway, but those of you wanting a sneak peak can go ahead and take a look.

I’ve installed the following on my Facebook profile:

• The Compass: a special widget from the Washington Post. You take a quiz about moral issues, and it gives you a compass showing you what side of the fence you lean towards politically. I’m mostly liberal, which I already knew, but it also lets you check out friends who have installed the Compass on their profile as well.
• iLike: A music widget that lets you add songs to your profile, as well as interacting with your friends on a musical level. You’ll be able to see how well you match up with your friends in terms of musical taste. They’ve also got a Free MP3 section that takes your favorite artists from your Facebook profile and matches them up with free mp3 downloads from similar indie artists; I’ve already discovered two great artists that I otherwise would have never heard.
• Twitter: Allows you to weave your Twitter postings in with your Facebook updates; you can also update Twitter directly from Facebook, which is a neat tool.
• Fantasy Moguls: A movie game. You can post the movies you want to see this weekend, and it’ll tell you which of your friends also want to see the flick you’ve chosen. You can send invitations to friends to see movies, and there’s also a neat game where you predict what the box office grosses will be for new releases and then get ranked against your friends. Killer.
• Picnik: A photo editing tool for Facebook. This one is great. I mean, absolutely fantastic. It’s got a Picasa-killer simple editing tool for photos that allows you to do everything from color corrections to neat effects like Lomo and heatmaps. This one is going to gain a lot of traction — a LOT.

I predict that five years from now, the world will look back on today as the day that Facebook fired the first shot that damaged the MySpace beast. This, more than anything else, is a game-changer.