Platform Wars hands power to Social Net users

Very interesting article on Read/Write Web about Facebook starting to discriminate between application usefulness and use that to manage allowed distribution - it's throttling, captain, but not as we know it

(Don't see any Open Access foundation going after Facebook as yet though..... )

Nonetheless, shows an interesting nuance in the way the social network is being opened up - as RWW notes:

Newsfeed notices are the Holy Grail for Facebook Apps, but the limits placed on the numbers allowed have always been a bit arbitrary. Allow too many notifications to be sent and users feel spammed by their friends' stupid zombie tossing, allow too few and application growth (and FB pageviews) are stunted.

And why now? After all, people have been p*ssed off about all this for months. It's because the Social Net space is getting much more competitive:

On the same night the sophisticated MySpace Application Platform was released to developers, Facebook announced an important forthcoming development that should make FB apps a whole lot less annoying. Let the Platform Wars begin!

So in the Olde MSM Worlde, competition meant lower prices - in the Social Media world, looks like it means handing people more of what we want (ie lowering the advertising potential of the platform)

Speaking of letting the Platform Wars begin, there is a rumour going round that Google or MySpace will buy Bebo (Hey, and why not Microsoft and Yahoo while we're at it - the case can be made for any of them....).

The price will be a very interesting number if it happens.

And also on the matter of platform wars, its interesting to note that Facebook opened its platforms in mid 2007, and its taken approximately 6 months for MySpace, Bebo et al to copy that and start to get traction. That's a very small competitive advantage window!