So Facebook has undoubtedly raised the bar in terms of social networking capability and expectation, and I imagine that LinkedIn and MySpace are now considering how to respond to the (perceived) explosion in growth in Facebook users (and therefore the probable loss of their own).

Having a development platform is a natural way of ensuring the continued extension and buzz around service and it seems to have been executed competently. The actual applications being developed at this time are maybe a little 'ho-hum' (I'm bored of zombie bites) but that should change over time.

Content additions and manipulation though are not the be all and end all of the story. As a user, I'd like to see an emphasis on faceted browsing that extends beyond the idea of privacy levels. Why?

Well, I use Facebook (or I seem to use Facebook) for friends, old school friends, work colleagues, professional contacts, ex-colleagues and so on. I don't have a particular privacy issue with any of those folk seeing 'my identity' (if I had a privacy issue I wouldn't use a networking site), but I might prefer to present information in a different way to differing groups of contacts. It is easy to imagine a flippant remark from a friend causing offence to a professional contact and so on. Facebook has a little of this in the idea of 'how do I know this person' and 'social timeline' but these concepts are far from concrete in terms of the practical application of proximity of one person to another and information relevance.

In reality I don't want to move my online identity to another site (I've never had a MySpace site, so using Facebook is not a problem, but I've seen commentary about that elsewhere: "why do I need to convince my friends to use this instead?").  I also don't want to maintain several mini-identities comprising of different facets (LinkedIn, Last.fm etc.).

So I'd like to be in it for the long haul with one caveat: this may differ if in the future I interact with a service that maintains the trappings of a digital identity (contact lists, photos etc.) but choose to surface them through a particular front end provider. We should bear in mind that social networking is not especially mature, and the current services seek to provide all aspects of the concept rather than component parts. This rather flies in the face of some of the points of Web 2.0 as a concept. (I'll probably post more on this).

I'd like to see, therefore, the idea of 'view creation' as a concept in the platform. I could then create a series of views and assign those as the default (or only) view for a given friend or network which presents my identity in the way I'd like it to be viewed by those parties.