Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are all reported to have been interested in paying billions of dollars for Facebook. It's recent success has been fuelled by allowing anyone to run an application within its pages. Application developers love Facebook because of:

1. Existing friends lists: A user does not need to persuade friends to create an account with each new application
2. 'Viral' publicity: There are many ways for a Facebook application to send messages to the friends of its users

#1 is good for users and for developers, but #2 is increasingly more in the interests of developers than users. I don't really care that Joe has added the cow throwing application, or that he has thrown a cow at Frank. I'm increasingly disinclined to go to Facebook because there are so many of these spam messages, all due to #2.

Ian Forrester recently had some more serious criticism of Facebook. Your information in facebook is only available to others with an account. To be part of the club you have to make a considerable investment in building Facebook's database. In turn, this data is only available to others who have an account. There's lots in that for Facebook, but little for us.

So, how could we get the advantages of #1, without the disadvantages of #2, and preferably in a more open environment? I bet Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many others who are envious of Facebook have been asking this question recently.

The good news is that there's been an open standard for friends lists for some time. FOAF, which stands for Friend of a Friend, allows you to describe who your friends are. It's just a data standard, so it does not come with any of the shiny user interfaces of Facebook. If people started to build social networks around FOAF we could pick the networks we use, but still communicate with our friends in other networks. We could even move networks when we got fed up of cow throwing.

Life would be better for us all, or at least those of us who don't own shares in Facebook.

I wonder it this is what Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are planning, since Facebook does not want their money?