Facebook's new design. One small step...

TechCrunch published an article with a screenshot of the future facebook's design.
Removing the left menu could be seen as a small step, however it isn't.

I actually expected this redesign since facebook started it’s app-platform. Keeping the left menu bar eats the space that could be used by apps. Now you have the chat with you and you are free to go anywhere. That's exactly the layout I use for my current project (mine is different of course, but i also keep all of the page free).

It can grow really big if facebook makes an effort to promote good apps made for it. Right now it’s not that interesting for serious developers, as promoting an app on facebook is almost as hard and expencive as promoting a standalone app. So if you don’t have a product that is designed to spam the contacts on facebook making an app for facebook or go standalone is a question. That leads to the fact that good apps are burried in tons of crappy apss making it hard for users to find them and moving serious developers away from making facebook a “platform of choice”. The very same mistake that google made launching it's i-google homepage. Services should be pre-selected and the user should have the possibility to switch it if they like the other one better. For example the micro-blogging button leads by default to twitter, but can be changed by the user to jaiku or pownce. Why force each user to check all the garbage to find a dimond he needs?

The web operational system.
As more and more apps are developed for the browser the importance of which PC you are using is going down. That's a real threat for microsoft and the current opportunity for the next Tech Star.
Though i really admire Yahoo I think Facebook is the only company right now that makes everything right. If microsoft wanted to ensure it's future business it should really buy facebook but with the team included. Without a team facebook is just a site that doesn't make huge profits now. Well I guess the search button will lead to live-search ) But that's not enough. Techcrunch is absolutelly right that google has the tech to make it's operational system, but they really mess the thing making everything a standalone project. You just can't drag-drop a note made in google-notebook to google-docs for example and a comfortable client to work offline is missing. My bet is that Facebook will be the most important web destingation soon if it actually improves it's messaging system.

The "walled garden".
I won't say Facebook should open up ) But the possibility to contact a person that is using Facebook from outside is vital. The thing is there are lots of people that don't want to be that public and we still write our e-mails on our business cards instead of the facebook/linkedin profiles. A business card could have an additional profile information, but without the possibility to contact a person that is registered in Facebook without having a profile there and a descent mail interface it just won't become a standart de-facto of internet messaging which is vital for the web operational system. You will be where all your contacts are.