Ryan A Graves.com

As many know Facebook held their annual developers conference yesterday at the San Fransisco Design Center. The agenda (shared below) emphasized three main changes coming to FB: more sharing, simplification, and getting developers more involved. There were a few main sites that will now be much more integrated with Facebook such as Digg and Seesmic! The live blog of that event was covered extremely well over at TechCrunch.

The question that was never answered fully is one that Max Levchin founder of Slide asked, “is Facebook going to create more contracted agreements with app development houses?” I can see why Max would obviously love that as one of the premier app developers. However, I don’t see that as such a great thing for Facebook or the development community as a whole. If Facebook starts entering into contractual relationships with the “big swinging dicks” of app development (Slide, RockYou) then the “little guy” development houses will not be able to participate or continue to  feed the Facebook app community with innovative ideas. Keeping things open and available for anyone has been the strategy for Facebook to grow their development platform since the beginning and judging by the excitement and attendance of yesterdays event it looks likes it has been working quite well!

So Mark, listen, keep the platform open. Give the little guys a chance at “making it big”. There are a lot of great start-ups out there that would love to use the Facebook platform to change the way people use the web but if you cut “deals” with these big dogs of the FB app world the small man is out of the game. Give’m a chance.

*I just saw this morning that my Facebook profile has been updated and wanted to share a small portion of the new look.

Agenda:

12:00 - 1:30 pm: Doors Open

Registration & Exhibitor Area Open

1:30 - 3:00 pm: Keynote, Mark Zuckerberg

3:30 - 4:15 pm: Breakouts Round 1

User Experience: Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More

Technical: Building to Facebook Scale

Business: Building a Business on Facebook

4:30 - 5:15 pm: Breakouts Round 2

User Experience: Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website

Technical: Advanced App Building

Business: Marketing your App on Facebook

Workshop: App Building 101

5:15 - 6:00 pm: Break

6:00 - 6:45 pm: Breakouts Round 3

User Experience: Building Great Applications on Facebook

Technical: Feed & Social Distribution

Business: Entreprenuership on Facebook Platform

7:00 - 7:45 pm: Breakouts Round 4

User Experience: Design & User Experience at Facebook

Technical: Made for Mobile

Business: fbFund - A look inside - Seeding Opportunity on Facebook

Workshop: Taking your Platform Application Global

8:00 - 12:00 am: After 8 Celebration

*Photos courtesy of Brian Solis

  I love this image because for me it encompasses the way people <bias> should use the internet<bias/>. Personally, these are the three tiers of my web experience. The hardware, the interaction, the information.

Tier #1: Apple 
As you probably know if you read this blog regularly I recently purchased a Mac Book Pro and absolutely love it. It is so nice to finally have a machine that I don’t have to worry about it working properly.  The suite of applications is just as robust or better than a PC running Windows and is likely better designed. So, let me just dispel the rumor that you won’t be able to find applications for a Mac. I can guarantee if you enjoy being on a computer at all then getting a Mac will exponentially increase that enjoyment. I see Macs continually increasing their market share and thus being the premier computers (mainly laptops) of the future.

Tier #2: Facebook 
In my eyes Facebook sort of represents social networking on the web. I was a relatively late adopter to the social web and that was in 2004 when Facebook really started to grow to other universities outside of Harvard. I remember the day that my school, Miami (OH), got Facebook. I joined that day. We had heard about it prior to its arrival because of the stink that MySpace was making. How much better is Facebook?

Obviously there are other social tools out there, that’s not what I’m arguing. I’m merely using Facebook as the poster child for the social web. Social software has changed the general uses of the web. The days of one way information flows on the internet are archaic. The web will can only get more and more interactive.

Tier #3: Google 
The top layer of these building blocks is Google. Really it could be the first layer or the middle later but for the sake of this image, its the top. Google is the key to the door that keeps information from the consumer. Can you imaging an internet where you had to guess URLs in order to find good websites? Or a web where only the highest paying websites would come up? You wouldn’t be reading this, that’s for sure (hold comments about wishing you weren’t reading this!) The web is open, accessible, free, opportunistic, all thanks to the guys who wanted to download the internet, Google.