Facebook Takes Fight to MySpace

Facebook's membership has grown to 24 million from the 10 million last September, when Yahoo! was courting it and just after it opened registration up to anyone (and not just college or high school students). It claims to be bringing aboard 150,000 new members a day.

That growth has largely come as Facebook hewed to a minimalist elegance of its interface and kept its brand off the mainstream radar -- two big pluses for alienated MySpace users.

Now Facebook is radically scaling up the social-network model into what it calls an online platform -- the way that a PC's operating software is a platform -- hosting social applications created by select partners. These partnerships will give Facebook access to features that MySpace will take months to create on its own.

Facebook has already signed up 65 partners, from Amazon.com (AMZN Quote), Microsoft , and Blue Nile to Obama for America.

Here's the kicker: Facebook is letting them keep all the revenue from ads served through their applications, provided the users stay on Facebook's site. No cut for Facebook, at least for now.

It's still too early to tell just where this new platform strategy will take Facebook. At the least, it's likely to propel it closer to MySpace's heels. MySpace feels like AOL in 1999 -- a bloated mishmash of features capable of drawing in new users and then pushing them on to more evolved alternatives.

In that case, the appetite of Internet and media giants for buying Facebook will only grow stronger. But if it's left independent for a few years, Facebook might just grow into one such giant itself, in which case it will be the one looking to buy new companies.