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Dave’s ecstatic about Facebook apps, and he’s nailed it with the Visual Basic Post, but he understates one huge advantage of the system.

Facebook has a group for everything these days, which is good because Unlike 99.99% of the Facebook population, I was born in the 60s. A byproduct of this history is that I sold software on diskettes and CDs from my junior year in high school until early 1997. Anyone who used to do that faced the problem that Microsoft, Apple, et al still do today — user registration. Before the Internet, 2% to 20% of users registered depending on circumstances. At best, Internet-based user registration tools may have doubled those earlier statistics.

And then, all of a sudden, Facebook offers everyone 100% detailed, real-time, shareable, saleable, user registration information for every application and every application user. And, we even know which of the applications users have social connections to each other in order to perform social marketing voodoo. Finally, the day after a user gets rid of an application, we never knew they were there.

Microsoft Office is at risk the minute that someone shoe-horns a hosted front-end for OpenOffice into FaceBook. Oh, Sun where art thou now?

Google might have most of the user registration data for its applications, but there is no way they’d release it or make a web service of it. Thousands of third parties can’t piggyback that treasure trove of user information to build new businesses on top of Google’s apps — so we won’t. The Google applications business might as well never have been started as it will now never hit the mainstream. Google will become a huge ISP, but breaking Microsoft’s applications monopoly is Facebook’s job.