Newsies Steve Outing (Looking for the anti Facebook) and Ryan Sholin (Find yourself a nice comfortable niche and sell it like blueberry pancakes) both seized on my lead on yesterday's Facebook post as an argument for niche networks.

Somewhere, I like to think, there is or will be a network comprising only those who can find it. And when I finally stumble in there, they’ll say, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

It’s not Facebook, a “social network” of 30 million or so.

I confess I was thinking less concretely, more like The Journey to the East.

It was actually the last thing I wrote, but sometimes the conclusion at the end of thinking and writing a piece is actually the natural lead. I never know how it will come out.

Dave Winer today puts one of my concerns about Facebook into more technical terms:

The great thing about the Internet was and is that it's the platform without a platform vendor. That's why it has been the engine of growth and innovation for so long, over thirty years now. There's no entity with eminent domain to foreclose on a developer's relationship with customers. And none of us are incentivized to care for a platform's garden in the same way we are with the community garden....

Facebook is a platform vendor, obviously, and when one develops a Facebook app, one is willingly climbing into the trunk, which has a lock, and only one entity has the key, the platform vendor.

From our side: Broken links: bad. All Facebook links are broken if you haven't joined the crowd.

Bonus link: Travel guru Arthur Frommer blogs a metaphor for Facebook: What's it like to cruise on one of those new ships carrying 3,000 passengers and more?