Facebook Becomes a Software Company with Platform Rollout

• A marketing firm called Terralever may be taking the FQL feature into the unknown, with a Facebook Platform application called stuffCloud. Essentially, it enables users to generate detailed lists of their favorite...things, in user-generated categories, with weights and measures (perhaps like "four stars") attached. The idea here apparently is to let users create their own database entries for products they'd happily endorse for others to use. This way, conceivably, advertising could generate FQL queries of the stuffCloud "collective," for lack of a known term for it, to retrieve the relative ratings points given for advertised items by Facebook users.
• Hosted gaming provider Bunchball will provide a means for Facebook users to share invitations to social online games hosted through its service.
• Channels.com has created a gadget that automatically delivers Facebook users video clips taken from shows listed in their favorites profiles.
• Online travel service SideStep is unveiling a service that enables users to share their vacation travel agendas, presumably with the aid of maps, so users can coordinate their plans and conceivably meet up.
• A company called FlipTrack has developed a gadget enabling users to assemble their own music videos taken from their own pictures and video clips, mashed together with segments from its own collection of professional videos. Periodically, the company will sponsor contests for the best video, and presumably Facebook users will be invited to cast votes.
• Finally, scalpers will appreciate Viagogo, whose Facebook Platform app will enable users to buy and sell tickets to live events with one another.

Of course, the future success of most of these applications will depend on the relative degree of trust users will continue to place in one another, and the service as a whole. The fundamental dichotomy of online social networking is that it typically serves as a vehicle for people to share selected parts of their identities. Either very trusting individuals spill the complete details of their lives - perhaps opening themselves up to very real dangers - or they share just the parts they want to share, the result often being that social networks become new markets for the trading of alter egos.

Facebook senior platform developer David Fetterman alluded to this fact in this morning's video, as he was discussing how anxious he was to use the platform to share personal book reviews with other users. "I'm a huge book whore [we listened to the tape very carefully, and had hoped he had actually said 'hoard'], so I can't wait until Book Reviews comes out," Fetterman said, "because I love telling people about books I've read, or books that I've pretended to have read."

It may be the Web's most ambitious experiment to date in mixing technology with sociology. By the time this project has seen its first year, we may be sorting out either some very real benefits or some very devastating damages, in the wake of Facebook having taken its "critical mass" audience and its cutting-edge Web services platform, and thrown it into a huge melting pot just to see what comes out.