ReadWriteWeb

You have to admit, he's getting better at this. Four years ago, in response to numerous public complaints - many of them in court - about its plans to share aggregate user data with third parties, Facebook responded in a flat, dismissive tone that users were given every opportunity to opt out of behavior sharing. So what they don't opt out of is effectively their own problem.

Today's settlement between Facebook and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission effectively ensures that the company can no longer take this specific stance without facing intense U.S. government scrutiny. But in the intervening four years, Facebook has become a veteran of government scrutiny, including from the Canadian Privacy Commissioner and throughout Europe. And it has gained a lot more skill at adapting its semantics to strike the right political and often psychological tones.

It's a bit unusual for us to be following the story of a bunch of Syracuse University kids being given a long, overnight assignment to build a proposal for a next-generation Web application about Major League Baseball. Granted, our series is slowly gaining popularity, including some welcome coverage from The Wall Street Journal, and quite a bit of late trending among social news sites. But what's our point, really?

We think - and by "we," I mean the folks who create Web technologies, produce Web publications, teach Web methodologies, wear "Web" on our T-shirts - that we are creating the nucleus of the future economy. We have the nerve to believe that the world's business, culture, entertainment, and communication will all take place through this twining together of hypertext. Here at last was an opportunity, in a mere 29 hours, to see if we're right.

One of the early promises of HTML5 was that it would become an enabler, giving smaller developers some of the power they needed to produce bigger tools on a broader platform. In recent months, however, it's become a common channel for driving developers and users towards native platforms. Whereas last year, developers criticized Microsoft for invoking the phrase "native HTML5" with respect to Internet Explorer, today you can't look anywhere in the HTML5 landscape without seeing some major provider's native interests looming on the horizon.

And Facebook is among those with an interest in HTML5. Last week, Charles Jolley, a popular developer whose dream since his time at Apple was for a JavaScript library called Strobe.js to enable and then to distribute cross-platform apps, found himself and his colleagues working for Facebook. It's difficult for anyone, including Jolley, to say exactly whether Facebook will be able to advance his original dream. But there were some things Jolley did want to say for the record, as soon as he was permitted to, and so he found himself speaking to ReadWriteWeb.

UPDATE Facebook has issued a statement to the All Facebook blog this afternoon, saying the company has made an out-and-out purchase of Strobe Corp., the project led by former Apple staffer Charles Jolley, this afternoon.

"We're excited to confirm that we've completed a talent acquisition for Strobe Corp., a mobile-app-development startup based in San Francisco," the statement reads. The statement does not go on to indicate whether the Strobe project itself, which was to have been a cross-platform HTML5 apps distribution system, will be picked up by Facebook. However, based on information a Facebook spokesperson gave RWW this morning, Jolley will be working on the mobile engineering team on an existing mobile apps distribution project for the Facebook Platform.

According to reports, Facebook's f8 developer conference this coming Thursday will have the motto "Read. Watch. Listen." Other than reminding me of a certain tech blog's name, this motto excites me because of the promise it holds that Facebook will fully embrace multimedia. But that has some major implications, which will affect many in the Web ecosystem. In this post we highlight 3 of the biggest potential implications.

To summarize the developments so far. TechCrunch reported that there will be three new buttons announced: "Facebook users will be able to click Read, Listened, Watched on content in their news feed. And soon, "Want" as well." Meanwhile All Things D reported that "Read" partners include big online publishers such as Yahoo, "Watch" will be "a range of Web video sites" and "Listen" will be music services.

The latest round of privacy controls improvements from Facebook - widely perceived as a response to competition from Google+ - let members select per-item policies for literally everything they post. It's a simple, but very pervasive, set of controls that let users set limits on everything, and preview their published assets as friends and the general public would see them.

But do these changes have any effect on what apps running on the Facebook Platform will be able to see? The way the Platform works now, a Facebook app runs with the permissions of its user. That makes sense, because how else can an app such as a game gain access to the list of friends with whom the user might want to play? Still, although it's officially against Facebook policy, apps are capable of collecting that data for servers that may store it for other purposes.

In good times everyone wants to be a platform. But when times are bad and platforms are just an expense, the resources suddenly shift away. The recent re-design of Facebook, the slow down of Google's Open Social, and Flock closing its extension site - these are all part of the same pattern. Platforms that don't have monetization wired in are only good for marketing. This is why the platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization.