Many of you may be wondering why there has been so much buzz surrounding the launch of the Facebook platform. Well if you have been cruising the blogosphere, you may have noticed a lot being written about the iLike application. The iLike team has experienced phenomenal growth as highlighted in the chart above. Not even ICQ, Hotmail, Skype, or Kazza compare to the explosive growth that has been experienced by the iLike folks.

If that chart doesn’t help you to understand the impact that this new platform is having on the web industry, I’m not sure what will. While I hate to be a contributor to extreme hype, I think Facebook may just be the platform that deserves it. Not even MySpace applications have experienced such phenomenal results as the top performing Facebook applications. It has been less than two weeks since the Facebook platform went live and there are already huge success stories. While the owners may not be driving around in Bentleys just yet, Facebook provides small businesses and start-ups with a significant opportunity. The next challenge will be figuring out a way to monetize the insane amount of traffic being driven to these application providers. It is truly an exciting time in the history of the net!