Another $40M for facebook. That doesn’t make it right.

I wrote earlier about the degree to which MySpace sucks as a model for staying in touch. Truth is, I really don’t care. MySpace is in it purely for profit, so it only makes sense that they’d try to confuse the hell out of their users while assaulting them with ads. That’s my perspective, at least.

Not everyone sees it my way, though. We get the “how does facebook do it?” question all the time. The answer is typically, “they do it wrong,” but I get the thought process behind the question. One would only assume that social networks have built their [user] experience around [user] behavior and that popularity demonstrates a successful implementation of [user] interface.

So, I give you MySpace, the most popular social network. Its user interface is most definitely not built around user behavior. Requiring 6 - 21+ clicks to send a friend a message should be sufficient proof of that.

Think facebook is any better? Nope. They just save you the effort of looking for the log in form by requiring you log in before you do anything at all.

So, the next time you find yourself asking how the popular sites “do it”, step back and also ask how you should be doing it. I like to think the latter is the better question.

Moral of the story: beware what you clone. We’ve all seen Multiplicity.

Related to the moral of the story: man, I wish I had my copy of Multiplicity with me last weekend while I was getting coffee.

So we’re winding down what Newsweek predicted would be the Year of the Widget. I don’t think it played out that way, but maybe I missed something. (Like predictions being worth reading.)

If there ever was any real widget momentum underway, it crashed when facebook kicked open the Platform. (Feel free to hit me in the comments for using facebook and open in the same sentence.)

I didn’t like the use of the platform label when Zuckerberg first declared it. But 10,000+ facebook apps make the use difficult to dispute.

I’m not typing on the virtues of facebook here. Personally, I think the thing sucks - all ur bits r belong to facebook. But we definitely feel the significance of the facebook platform a hell of a lot more than any supposed widgetization of the web. (This coming from a work request point of view.)

Enough talk of the borg. The idea that we’re declaring working models is far more significant. Let’s example in on Twitter again. Popular opinion holds it as a working model. So, rather than build a standalone app to track iou’s, why not grab on to the API and drop a new publishing rule into the existing ecology?

I like platforms. Experimentation gets easier. It’s not the new way of doing things, it’s another way. The web is gaining sophistication.

Bang in their name or not, it’s hard to get excited about Yahoo! Even after a year’s worth of commentary following Brad Garlinghouse’s peanut butter manifesto, I still don’t get their corporate strategy or see any forward progress. Maybe I don’t care enough about their brand to pay attention any more.

That said, I’m at Flickr every day. And upcoming. And del.icio.us. And MyBlogLog. And if Y! could pull off a Twitter acquisition, they’d have all the components for a fundamentally improved social experience (and the perfect mouse trap for my online attention).

Presence. Check.

That’s right, I included MyBlogLog in a short list of apps that I hit on a daily basis. I won’t try to change your mind on the service itself, but if ever there was an app that almost implemented the foundation for the perfect social network, it’s MBL.

MyBlogLog decentralizes presence. There is no log in wall, no data lockdown, no single destination. Just a networked profile and a footprint that surfaces on participating services. It’s a simple idea. But it’s fundamentally better than the opposite approach of old networks like facebook.

So, assuming MBL & Y! realized their full potential, you’d no longer have to play constant gardener to profiles scattered across the internets.

Content. Check.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t produce content inside closed networks. My blog posts, Flickr streams, Tweets, bookmarks, etc, are all available for re-syndication. So, hypothetically, I could roll all my content into a single-point stream of consciousness and call it my online me.

But I prefer the idea of leaving it in the field. My Tweets have more context with friends than without. My Flickr photos are organized in sets, collections, and groups. My bookmarks are tagged. My events list other attendees. My posts have comments. (Sometimes.)

In other words, content has more meaning in its native habitat. (Much of that habitat being Y! properties.) And as much as I dig Jaiku, I think a lifestream could be a lot more than a blended river of xml.

Connections. Check.

Far be it from me to criticize anything that Microsoft values at greater than $15B, but my issue with facebook is that I have to be a registered facebook user and facebook friend of another facebook user to interact with them inside facebook. What if we’re already Twitter pals? Facebook doesn’t care.

Yahoo! could care. With very little effort. It could see that I’ve friended / followed a member of one of its niche communities and extend that connection throughout its properties. It could show me streams from friends specific to events I’m attending. It could let me know when friends are in my vicinity. It could do more. And with MBL, they could extend this even further.

Yahoo! remains a player. I wonder if they’re aware.