Earlier this year, I thought Facebook was amazing. I updated my profile every day, sometimes many times a day. I was visiting 10 or 20 every day. I was adding billions of applications, biting chumps and poking my friends. Briefly, it became an obsession.

It wasn’t just me. There was a time in summer 2007 in London when you couldn’t go anywhere without catching the word “Facebook” in bars and pubs and events and public transport and even from groups of people passing you on the street. There was a time, I estimated, when I was hearing just the word “Facebook” about 70-100 times a day. The newspapers were doing a daily Facebook story. It was on telly. It was everywhere.

The novelty wore off. I leveled out at maybe one or two visits per day. But now, in the past few days, my profile page has broken: it’s become invisible to me. Earlier this year, I’d have gone insane if this had happened but the weird thing is that I just don’t care. I’m almost relieved. I don’t feel anything. This has led me to wonder what I really feel about Facebook. Now I wonder if Facebook ‘the brand’ and me have what it takes to get us through the tough times.

I ask because I’m still a committed user of both Flickr and del.icio.us. And I feel very different about them: they’re both cool. I have a kind of an emotional attachment to them. I can imagine (yes, this is a bit sad…) wearing a Flickr or del.icio.us t-shirt. They are services with whom I have a relationship, unlike Facebook which acts as a ’series of toobs’ to pipe lots of other relationships (including with Flickr and delicious) into my life. Flickr and delicious get better and more useful as I add more content - tagged and networked photos and links. Facebook arguably gets more burdensome the more friends you have. It describes itself as a “social utility” - like email, mobile phone, water, gas and electricity. I don’t have a particularly strong relationship with any of these other utility brands either. It’s like, either they work or they don’t. And if they don’t I get a new supplier. There’s not a lot of emotional connection.

Now, bizarrely, some Bebo users are revolting against the launch of its platform for application integration: ‘Bebo Apps’. It’s not a very big revolt (4m Bebo applications were installed in their first week) but it’s interesting that some are complaining that Bebo can no longer differentiate itself from Facebook by not having applications. The fact is that Bebo already has a service that many of its members feel passionate about. They argue that it didn’t need to become a platform. Now, many fear it is going to become another bland Facebook ‘utility-brand’. This puts them at odds with the site’s owners, who would very much like to make it a platform so they can monetise the community and harness the free labour of external developers.

The question is, will it make Bebo better for all of its users in the long run? And what happens when every social network is an open platform, or connected by one, and you get the same apps from the same developers in every network? Why should I then belong to a Facebook instead of a Bebo, or vice versa? I was a big fan of the open platform but it doesn’t seem to be enough on its own, and certainly not in a world where they’re ten-a-penny. What else is there about Facebook apart from its open platform and scale that’s so uniquely brilliant?

I honestly can’t think of much and I’m not sure I can even be bothered to contact them about my profile. It’s a great Christmas present. Thanks Facebook.

Tags: api, applications, apps, bebo, delicious, facebook, flickr, openplatform, socialnetwork