This is a great development for a couple of key reasons:

Websites are more sophisticated - Facebook applications can only stuff so much into that little profile
Portability - I can now import my friend list into another website - big win for FB and users, not so good for third party services trying to bridge this gap. Not threatening OpenID yet.
Ubiquitous Social Computing - the future of the web will be closely tied to applications with a social relevance. Akin to how the internet multiplied the utility of desktop computers, social computing and platforms will do the same, but also include the mobile web.

Learn something new every day - read interesting blogs
Often, the fastest way Up is Out - if you don’t have a large stake in a company, remember that you’re the chicken in the breakfast, not the pork (committed vs. affiliated)
Reverse engineer the job you want - get a mentor
Education matters, but not as much as you thought - you don’t have to go to business school to make a lot of money
You are a company of one - enumerate your personal accomplishments and be able to articulate them
Develop your plan, and put it in writing - don’t be lazy

A couple weeks ago I posted about how LinkedIn can help you build your career as well.

From my vantage point on the ground, I agree that there is less interest in the platform. However, it’s less interest from the amateur crowd; the kinds of guys that throw up a poke application in weekend just to see how it does (a plethora of quiz apps have also diluted the application count). There is a “professionalization” of the Facebook platform afoot, where small groups of developers or companies are gaining a better grasp of how the platform works and starting out with more sophisticated strategies (launching portfolios of applications, or developing many more small applications). We’re passing through the hype curve and have finally found that the Facebook platform can’t make everyone instant millionaires (although for some it comes pretty damn close).

Update: Jesse addresses a lot of this in an update.

I think the platform’s unfairly getting a bad rap with many writers overly criticizing the platform. Boomtown and AlleyInsider criticized the platform as trivial, essentially saying apps were trivial and that they earn no money. While many apps are trivial, what did they expect? A mammography app that would detect cancer? People log on to social networks in their free time, not as part of work. Users, in aggregate, will cringe at the idea of real work. That’s why Google’s image labeler doesn’t work as well as Flickr’s image tagging.

Arguing that the entire platform is trivial because a subset or even majority of apps are useless, broken, or boring is tantamount to saying there’s nothing interesting in the blogosphere because there are 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day (source). That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. And some of them are even inane spammy blogs like this.

The book? “Founders at Work“, by Jessica Livingston. If you haven’t heard of it already, you should have. It’s a series of no B.S. interviews with founders of some of the largest tech companies in the valley (PayPal, Google, Apple, etc.). I prefer books like this because the narrative doesn’t gloss over the tough or unsightly bits of running a company like so many business books do in order to support their larger thesis.

I’d particularly recommend the Evan Williams interview, considering the open monetization questions about Twitter.

With a finger to the sky, I’m getting the feeling that users are getting restless and looking elsewhere. I recently looked at the Alexa stats for Facebook and MySpace and noticed an interesting cross over. At the beginning of April, Facebook surpassed MySpace in the rankings. Anecdotally, one of my best friends, who clearly fell in the MySpace camp (cool musician), joined Facebook and apparently abandoned his MySpace profile.

These services exist in a marketplace, and with the rise of Facebook and advent of OpenSocial / DataPortability, switching behavior will become easier. Social technology will also permeate a whole new set of properties (friendfeed, socialthing) that give users what they want, the chance to connect with old and new friends.

Users will vote with their clicks and take their business somewhere less cluttered. Users want to connect with old friends. Seeing the latest trailer or band is only incidental. Developers will also trickle away from the site if they’re not given a fair shake to make a profit, as Facebook is doing. MySpace may be making a dollar today, only to lose two in a year.

TechCrunch was really at the center of two turning points, the growth of blogging as a business and the next growth spurt of the web. TechCrunch fostered the growth and attention on startups unlike any other site on the web. It also gave rise to the idea that readers could get more value from reading a blog by an entrenched industry expert(s) instead of the business section of their paper. I look at the attention Mike’s getting as not only his personal validation, but also validation of the community the site’s fostered over the years.

Congrats.

We gave some substantial advice to each of these blogs about how to improve. However, that avoided the larger question of why you should have a blog. The answer is that not every company should.

Blogging is one of many publishing tools for disseminating your company’s message, not a panacea for customer acquisition. Jason Calacanis just had a great post on other social media methods. And since they take a lot of time to maintain and do well, you need to think of what ROI you can get out of it.

Blogs are good for businesses with a focused user base. SocialMedia’s target audience isn’t in the millions, it’s in the thousands, so maintaining a blog makes sense. But the blog is only one part of the strategy of reaching those people. We can get our message out by attending events and engaging with several blogs already in the space. So, I’m currently going to a lot of social networking related events and doing some guest posting for some of the stellar blogs in the space. Granted, from my time at TechCrunch it’s a bit easier for me.

However, a lot of other interest categories are filled with part time bloggers that could use a coordinating force. The conservationist category seems like an ideal example. There are many passionate part time or amateur bloggers out there, but they don’t have a unifying node to centralize the conversation in that space. This opens an opportunity for a great organization like the Monterey Bay Aquarium to come along and give those part timers a place to contribute and have their voices heard.

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Here are the slides from my workshop yesterday with Eric and Trish.

Otherwise, after the talk, I’ll be heading back to SocialMedia HQ for a quick bar stop from 5-7pm before the night’s festivities. RSVP if you’d like to stop by.