Everybody is talking about how the new Facebook Platform is the mana from heaven. But after the dust settles, and emotions and hormones stabilize, and this hits the users I think it’ll be a surprise at the results from this new platform. I have been using Facebook from the day that the network for my university opened. Here are the reasons that I think the new platform will not become the holy grail.

1. Facebook WAS the anti-myspace.com - MySpace is like a spam dump, it was hot when it launched because it satisfied a lot of hungry egos, but now people are realizing that it’s not a really meaningful way to connect with people in a controlled environment. With Facebook opening up everything to new companies, there’s going to be an infusion of new services and products that might appear useful or provide benefits but are really just time wasters and spam masquerading as such. If I want to read DIGG, I’ll read DIGG at their site, I don’t want it appearing in my news feed or anywhere else.
2. My Data is being Shared - Although the applications will “live” on facebook.com, data is shared with the third party. What will happened with my data?
3. Take care of basics - All of these few applications are supposed to take it to the next level, but I can’t even turn on my Facebook Mobile text because facebook doesn’t have an agreement with T-Mobile. It’s disappointing to see other things developed when the basics are not been met. “They have no bread”, “Then, give ‘em cake”.
4. Irrelevance - Reading DIGG or playing with another app is not something that most people will want to do on Facebook, and this is not because they might not find it useful, but because most facebook users are not the A-Type-Geek people. Most don’t care and are not in the technology fields. Facebook worked for a long time because they it was simple and it was relevant to what people wanted to do, which was to connect with other people.
5. Use their own product - if facebook is so good, why don’t they profile their users and release this first to the tech people and then everybody else will maybe follow along? Of course they won’t do this, they will launch it for everybody at once and there will be a backlash to so much hitting at once.
6. Facebook has no choice - Facebook has not choice but to innovate because their return on advertising is really low. They can’t justify or charge a lot of money for their ads because nobody clicks on them, so they have to produce new products and new services that advertisers can seek in as maybe being something half useful, but ultimately it’s to increase the ROI.
7. Getting banned - Myspace is banned in many companies and organizations because it is seen as a time waster, Facebook had the image of being more a networking and connecting type of a site. With the launch of the Platform and the many times wasters that will be included in this, many more organizations will end up blocking it just for this reason.

I do want to say that I’m a big fan of Facebook and what they are trying to accomplish, but we need to approach this in a level headed manner. Realizing that Facebook is in all this to make a profit and grow while appearing to be useful and providing value.

Sidenote: When you add an application it lists it in your feed so that others see it, but when you stop using and delete an application it does NOT appear in your feed. Interesting.