First, if you have not begun reading Marc Andreessen’s blog, put it in your feed reader and start.

Now, turn your attention to Marc’s analysis of Facebook and ignore any reference to “Facebook.”

I often find that Web 2.0 labeled technologies’ infrastructure and philosophical value is lost in the immaturity of current users implementation. That is not to say that lowering the bar to users being able to use technology for trivia purposes is bad. It does mean that we often look at a technologies current implementation and reduce it to myopic categorizations like MySpace is for teenagers, Facebook is for college kids, LinkedIN is for business adults, and Twitter is just lunacy.

The key point to be observed in this post:

Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.

Definitionally, a “platform” is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

In contrast, an “application” is a system that cannot be reprogrammed by outside developers. It is a closed environment that does whatever its original developers intended it to do, and nothing more.

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