TechCrunch has a really good article about the FaceBook platform, one year later.

It’s a rather long article, so I’ll summarize for the reading impared.

The takeaways:

• Few applications actually extended FaceBook, and most were garbage (that’s a technical term)
• Developers looked for any way to exploit the system for eyeballs rather than provide value
• The clean design of FaceBook was polluted by the applications
• The applications that did get a lot of traffic slowed FaceBook because the applications (and server configurations) couldn’t scale
• The applications that were useful, FaceBook would implement the feature was part of the core application (destroying the initial application, ala Apple)
• The only thing that has been consistent about FaceBook has been it’s inconsistency in applying the rules (read: applications that paid them money got better access than other applications)
• Very few application developers are making money off

MySpace is actually doing a good job on limiting some of the issues that FaceBook never learned from — it’s not as easy to spam on MySpace because they are throttling the commenting and messaging — so being the second mover isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The applications are also a better fit for MySpace because it’s “teenager’s bedroom” nature of the design and user interface.