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Not another article on the Facebook Platform

As covered in every major tech/business news source over the last week, Facebook recently opened up their user base to external companies via their Facebook platform program.

Enter iLike, a music recommendation engine and one of the first Facebook Platform applications. As of May 31st, 7:56 PM, iLike has 981,222 users on Facebook. The Facebook Platform has been live since May 24th. Therefore, Facebook users became iLike members at the rate of ~122,650 / Day.

The implications of this are significant to say the least, and I'll try not to delve into the obvious ones here.

What I find interesting about this case is it is further proof of the immense power a small number of companies have over North American Internet Users. It almost seems as though as the Internet grows larger and larger, power is consolidating into the hands of a small number of players: Google has search, Facebook has social networking, eBay auctions, craiglist classifieds, etc...

While this shouldn't be surprising, there is no doubt a certain irony in the fact that the Internet was supposed to "democratize" information and business. Instead, it seems a small number of super-organizations have emerged which present greater threats to personal privacy and information security than anything which existed before the 'net.