Christopher Beam has written an article about how Facebook can crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google. While the article doesn’t effectively explain how they can do this, it’s a great title and there are some good points made. One topic that is touched on is the backlash occurring against the massive addition of thousands of applications to the platform. This is an understandable backlash given that everyone’s feeds are getting polluted with all the application additions and removals. There is a simple solution to the problem: Facebook needs to add news-feed filters. While you can currently select which actions show up in your personal news-feed, you cannot filter which actions of other people show up in your news feed. Shouldn’t you be able to determine what is news to you?

Another great topic of discussion within the article is the release of Facebook Wallet. While I falsely labeled it as breaking news in my last post (it has since been updated), this will be a huge step for Facebook bringing them into direct competition with Amazon and eBay. While this will take time to manifest itself, the release will be a big one. Look for that to happen in the coming months.

Finally, the article covers a couple small actions that Facebook can make to become more competitive in the startpage landscape. First, Christopher Beam suggests that Facebook create an effective chat program. Personally, I’m not quite sure that this is necessary given that there is already a chat application that is powered by Userplane. The other suggestion that Christopher makes is to integrate Gmail and other email applications directly into Facebook. I highlighted this previously. I’m fairly confident that someone is working on this. Just a hunch.

The bottom line here is that people in the industry are still trying to wrap their heads around the Facebook platform. We are going to see a lot of changes take place in the coming months. While the launch may not have been flawless, Facebook is certainly working hard to fix any bugs and make everything more seamless. There are only better things to come!