Last Thursday, Facebook's Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the "start of a movement." This was the dramatic setup for his announcement of the Facebook Platform. Any developer can now build on top of the "social graph" within the facebook framework. The "social graph" meaning the network of users within the Facebook social network. 

The Facebook platform offering promises 3 main things:
1. Deep Integration  - Users will be able to add and remove any applications. You can use the Facebook markup, you can use Flash, Silverlight, you can create as many pages as you want.
2. Mass Distribution - The promise here is the access to Facebook's over 24 Million active users that form the backbone of the social graph. These people can be reached through newsfeeds, alerts, notifications.
3. A New Business Opportunity - This is either ad-based revenue or transaction-based revenue. You can build your apps and give them away for free with ads. Or you can charge customers for use of your apps. Pretty much, the Facebook partners I saw weren't going the transaction route.

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO Slide, Inc., (who shared the stage with Zuckerberg, Dan'l Lewin from Microsoft and Russ Grandinetti from Amazon), hinted at even bigger things in his encouragement to the large crowd "Build on top of these new operating systems. Build a large company on top of this platform." Is Facebook's platform announcement really a new operating system or just a brilliantly clever way to have partners make the already popular social network more sticky and create more pages for ad real estate?

I think the former statement is pretty clear. With already well over 80 partners, almost all offering free services (read: ad-based business models), it will be interesting to see if the other social networking sites follow-suit and allow partners and potentially users to share in ad revenue. The claim to be a new OS is a little less clear to me. It has some merit (allow 3rd party apps to be built within the Facebook framework, add/remove apps, rudimentary permissions), but when I think of Web OS, for some reason, I'm not really thinking within a social networking site. Nevertheless, the new offering is fascinating and the amount of partner enthusiasm impressive. I never would have guessed Facebook would take this step, but it makes complete sense in the evolution of the current web - open APIs and services + advertising focused revenue streams + leveraging consumer audiences in what Zuckerberg coins "the social graph." It will be interesting to see what fate or F8 has in store for Facebook's future.