By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Beyond joining the cool kids at the table again, Facebook is ready to begin stepping on the toes of its biggest competitors, Google and Twitter. And they are positioning themselves to put more nails in the MySpace coffin.

Facebook has been rejuvenated by the release of new products, interface improvements and acquisition of FriendFeed. A service much loved by brand name nerds that were able to grok the arcane interface and discussion method.

Facebook is now positioned (with some tweaks) to stunt Twitter’s growth, enter real time search as the dominate player and extend its platform much further than Google or Twitter through its API.

Stunting Twitter’s Growth

Facebook and its audience are maturing. And this maturation makes it more tolerable for the cool kids to come back to the service. Cool kids in this case being those that were first to jump on board and when the unwashed digital masses began showing up they jumped ship to avoid those newbies getting Dooced for moronic updates.

The audience maturation shouldn’t overshadow the growth of Facebook as a more robust platform for messaging. With changes in chat, fan pages, the release of Facebook Lite and snatching up FriendFeed they are acting on a strategy to better control ads that provide a higher ROI for advertisers, removing excess interface components to run a lean set of products like Lite and integrating the core of an API that can power a massive real time search engine.

All of these capitalize on growing an audience by word of mouth and new services build on top of the Facebook platform. With both this combined maturation it will be harder for Twitter to justify the lack of features that it offers as a core service. No payloads of video or audio, chat or multiple user pages for the same account. Today’s users expect these features and more like social search.

Real time Social Search

Facebook has done a great job of making recommendations of people to friend and groups to join. They track every bit of activity that you perform on the site, analyze it and then offer up customized recommendations. Add the FriendFeed engine to this and you have an extremely powerful real time social search utility.

Users on Facebook are heading to the front lines, where the cool kids have been for years, to fight the battle against an ever expanding delta of information. The best weapon to use in this battle is created by harnessing the power of each users friend base to narrow incoming river of information . . . to begin with. By using this select group of trusted confidants the delta begins to shallow and offer more valuable focused results.

When users are selecting who they are friends with, they have assigned trust of some varying level in the individual and the type information that they will be sharing. Many times friends or colleagues or members of other hobby groups will share information accordingly to their interests in updates and on their account pages. Real time social search depends on this trust to deliver the most relevant items to a searcher. Facebook has this built in as a core feature.

The I/O of Data, Ads and Opportunity

It is hard to know where to begin. Facebook recently updated their Connect feature which simplified their API somewhat but it still relies on Facebook Markup Language (FBML) a proprietry list of namespaces and commands that interact with Facebook’s platform.

I fully expect that Facebook will be releasing a version of their API that conform with the ease of use that existed with FriendFeed’s. The FriendFeed API was more akin to that of Twitter than their own. The Twitter API is simple to use, open very powerful.

The release of a simpler API that delivers data in JSON or XML to satisfy developers on different platforms would strengthen all third party tools. It could open Facebook’s platform to a greater influx of user generated data to power robust social search and ad inventory. Which is what will keep the ship afloat.

There has been some discussion recently about charging for API usage versus paying developers for using your API. Evidence suggests that the latter is the winning choice to build a strong developer network. Facebook is in a position to drive this type of revenue stream and turn it into the AdSense of the developer world.

Conclusion

Facebook is in a position like no other company to capitalize on paying developers a slice of the advertising pie for including targeted ads in their applications. And if they can be delivered with the content that Facebook is sending developers in a way that allows devs to enhance or choose better, more targeted ads for their applications audience, Facebook would be walking into El Dorado with a smelter the size of the Rhode Island on their back.

For now they have the ability to step on some toes, be it pretty hard. In the coming months and long-term, look for them to begin breaking backs by acquiring properties to freeze out competitors and adding new features for social search.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Tags: El Dorado , Facebook Lite , Facebook search , Facebook Social Search , FBML Facebook API , FriendFeed , Real Time Social Search , Twitter API