Cameron Olthuis

When Facebook launched their platform a little over a month ago I thought it was very exciting news. I said that it was going to change everything.

The Facebook Platform will basically be a mini-web in a sense and this will make it the most important portal on the web.

The platform is still very exciting and I believe it will help Facebook grow to become the biggest social network on the web. But they won’t become the most important portal or site on the web and here’s why.

As Jason Kottke points out - Facebook is a walled garden with nearly everything published under private profiles.

Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you’re not a Facebook user, you can’t do anything with the site…nearly everything published by their users is private.

This is a huge roadblock for the majority of people on the web. It’s also a huge roadblock for Google indexing the information and making it available in their search results. It’s for this reason that Facebook won’t become the most important site on the web anytime in the near future.

I do think, however, that we’ll start to see a lot more open platforms like this one in the future. It seems to be a win-win for both users and companies (on both ends) alike and so far we’ve some pretty stellar successes.

So while Facebook may not be ‘the one’, their example will set the tone for what will be a important direction of the web. Of course, as Jason points out, if Facebook opens up in the future this argument means nothing.