… no no, not facebook! Who cares about facebook when there’s so much stuff outside of it! Google, Yahoo, Flickr, your personal blog (if you have any of course) - you name it!

So despite everyone around being more and more bound to facebook, and touting it as the “next web platform, the one and only website we need” - sorry guys, I’m not buying it. However big, facebook is just that - a website. Sure you can meet lot of friends there, make great connections and build facebook apps - but thats still a closed platform - facebook’s platform. You can’t do everything you want there, you can do just what they allow  you to.  It was always like this - and it will remain this way. Not just on facebook, but everywhere - on every single web site out there (counting google too of course).

So what could be the true next web OS platform? Well, not a website of course. A browser. Or more precisely - a browser’s standard (though, one thing I’m sure is that there will never be just one standardized browser).

In his recent post about standardization  of Ajax UI in the future, Joel (the one from the software ) proposed a very interesting idea of some piece of the code, so called “NewSDK” getting catched in the browser:

“But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast.”

All the above is very interesting of course, but hey, sky is the limit - why write only “Ajax NewSDK”? Why not complete webapp SDK. When your browser is no longer a browser but provides a complete SDK - it’s effectively becoming more than a browser - a programming platform on its own.

Imagine web widgets installed not on your facebook account, but on your browser (no, not just google-bars etc. I mean REAL applications installed on the browser) - connecting together not just your facebook friends but ALL your friends from all social networks. Imagine being able to select which SDK, which web standard you want to upload to your “browser-OS” and run natively (single sign-on anyone? Office 2.0 to stay?) - and which one you just don’t want to use anymore.

Imagine browser being your desktop, your place of work, your PC… whoow, say that again? Yup. The problem with Joel’s theory is that “caching SDK on my browser” means installing software on my computer. So if it really is going to happen, if we really are going to see browsers becoming new web platforms - then it means “Personal Computer getting personal again”.

But hey, thats not that bad. After all, we all loves our PCs. And despite all the “net is the new thing” stuff, everyone single person I know have their own PC at home. So I believe it will take a while before we really starts becoming so “free” to use “our documents anywhere we like”. PC is here to stay - its not longer the only elements of our home network, but still an important part. But the way we are using it - will change. Behold facebook and microsoft, for the power of Internet is not in PC vs. Web fight, but in connecting both world together and melting the border between then - the border which for most of us is our web browser.

The day when my next OS appears to be giant web browser with just some top-layers apps constantly caching streams of data from various websites out there is the final destiny for sure. But what’s the first step from where we are here to where we are suppose to be then? Build more browser/web apps. And FireFox/IE, please let those apps integrate better with user’s browsers. We are sooo tired of “helpful” browser plugins like google of yahoo-bar. We want full grown apps now. Its the next natural step. Let the browser be your platform.