Alright, Facebook released Platforms last night — meaning that anyone with some coding knowledge and a dream can throw together a widget comparing all of their friend’s profiles to Paris Hilton’s movements across the United States. Excited? Honestly I’m not.

Amazon, Microsoft and Digg are planning on developing applications — fine.

They are opening up their information vault to an unprecedented degree — OK.

Everyone else in the world is talking about it — right, better get to that post then.

Instead of rehashing the same old Facebook meme, I’ll tell you a story in quotes and pictures — that basically rehashes the meme.

The Announcements

From Liz Gannes, GigaOm

This move is more than catching up with MySpace and Bebo and what have you by adding outside widgets; Facebook has become a primary relationship and identity broker for millions of people. Now outsiders can capitalize on that information in a safe way, pulling from users’ expressed interests in their profiles, building on their stated intention to attend events, or simply giving them more dedicated tools for expressing themselves.

Pete Cashmore, Mashable

There’s a huge announcement buried under all the Facebook Platform buzz today: Facebook is launching a video service to compete with all the major video sharing sites. So not only should MySpace be shaking in its boots, but YouTube also has cause for concern.

Dan’s Faber, ZdNet

It’s a utility in terms of a tool for the 24 million Facebook users, but it also reflects Facebook’s desire to become a utility, like an power company, in which potentially billions of people use the service in their personal and professional lives. Facebook, MySpace, and other growing colonies of linked communities with semi-permeable walls represent the rise of the social Web and Web utility companies.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Facebook is the walled garden of all walled gardens. Mark must have been racking his brain to find new ways to add traction to the system without running afoul of his user base (as he has done several times in the past).

The one thing that facebook has always been missing is the ability to deeply customize the way you view their content. Things like the photo album have always drawn a lot of traffic because users have the ability to interact with them in ways that a lot of the rest of the site lacks.

It’s looking more and more likely that they are not planning to go the acquisition route. Between this and the classified announcement, Facebook appears to be digging in for the long haul.