Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook’s 276 million.

That’s a 16.6% growth rate at Facebook in one month. This simply doesn’t happen with sites that already have hundreds of millions of users. It was less than a year ago that MySpace and Facebook were the same size.

I think that Facebook's platform approach is a harbinger of a large number of new Internet plug-in APIs that will be created for lots of other Internet services from here on out. Which is great: developers will be able to inject new functions into many other Internet services in the future, just like they can with Facebook today.

As a historical side note, in retrospect, this is what AOL should have done in the mid 1990's when the web first popped up. At that point, AOL had a huge user base relative to the consumer Internet. However, AOL was completely closed -- third parties couldn't build new functions or apps that could plug into AOL and be used by AOL users. As a consequence, all of the creativity and third-party effort that AOL might have harnessed had they provided a plug-in API -- a way for third parties to build apps that would inject new functions into the AOL user experience -- went to the web instead. A few years later, it became clear to AOL users that the web is where all the interesting stuff was, and then when broadband came along and people had to switch ISPs anyway, the users bailed on AOL.

Seen through this lens, Facebook -- and I mean this in the best possible way -- is the new AOL, but, by also being a platform, executing the opportunity correctly.

Technically, with an Internet plug-in API approach such as Facebook's, the third-party app itself lives outside the platform -- outside the core system -- just like I described for Level 1 platforms. The code for the app runs somewhere else. This means that just like with Level 1 platforms, the entire burden of building and running a Level 2 platform-based app is left entirely to the developer -- who still needs to provide her own runtime system, programming language, database, servers, storage, networking, bandwidth, and security, and who still needs to take responsibility for running all of the above.

Level 3 is what I call a "Runtime Environment".





In a Level 3 platform, the huge difference is that the third-party application code actually runs inside the platform -- developer code is uploaded and runs online, inside the core system. For this reason, in casual conversation I refer to Level 3 platforms as "online platforms". Let me explain.




• A Level 1 platform's apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services -- this is how Flickr does it.
  
  

• A Level 2 platform's apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API -- this is how Facebook does it. Most likely, a Level 2 platform's apps also call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services.
  
  

• A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.
  
  




In addition, it is highly likely that a Level 3 platform will also superset Level 2 and Level 1 -- i.e., a Level 3 platform will typically also have some kind of plug-in API and some kind of access API.





Put in plain English? A Level 3 platform's developers upload their code into the platform itself, which is where that code runs. As a developer on a Level 3 platform, you don't need your own servers, your own storage, your own database, your own bandwidth, nothing... in fact, often, all you will really need is a browser. The platform itself handles everything required to run your application on your behalf.

MySpace has put the axe to yet another startup. Last night they made a call threatening legal action against freshly launched TellThem.mobi, a service that lets you message all your friends from your mobile phone.

TellThem’s site simply reads:

“On Wednesday August 29th, 2007, we got a call from MySpace threatning to take legal action if we didn’t take the website down. Apparently it violates their terms of service…. switch to Facebook.”

Switch to Facebook indeed. TellThem is only one in a long line of startups getting bullied by MySpace. Previously they killed DatingAnyone, SingleStatus, copied RealEditor, stalled all widgets, and played chicken with PhotoBucket.

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