I was never a big fan of Facebook in the first place. I have an account there. I have a bunch of friends over there. I’ve used the thing occasionally over the last four months. There is absolutely nothing revolutionary about the technology. You’re limited in a lot of ways, not the least of which is the fact that someone absolutely must be a member to see your data there. So everyone who invests time in that site automatically requires their friends, family and acquaintances who want to keep up with them must join Facebook. Its like the ultimate pyramid scheme.

Like many people I was waiting to see what Facebook would come up with in terms of their shiny new ad model. Whatever they did the smartest move they could make is to cut the users who actually make the site worth something into the action. Didn’t happen. Instead we now see that the kids at Facebook have been toiling day and night to make the social network an amusement park for marketers. I think that’s fair game to a certain extent. The site is free after all. But then again Facebook is worth zilch without the users. So why not give something to the users?

One way that Facebook could have (or could still) compensated users was by adding some more features. How about the option to create a public profile? Or an RSS feed for all of your Facebook activity? How about a rewards program so that popular people can earn something for their loyalty to the service?

I look at this thing and the only upside that I can see for the individual users is the fact that many of them have friends and colleagues active on Facebook. What technology on Facebook is so revolutionary besides their new ad targeting? The brand marketers surely have a reason to stay but the users can find the same functionality and more someplace else.

I think that it’s reasonable to expect that Facebook should attempt to make more money to support their service. Lord knows that they need to now that they have $500 million of investors money. But its also very reasonable for users to expect that with the innovations for advertisers come innovations for the users. And many of the things that Facebook doesn’t do are not technically difficult in any way. Many other social networks have open profiles and activity feeds.

The people who run Facebook would do well to create more features that appeal to users while allowing user data to be made available on the wider internet. Because even though 50 million user accounts is a lot we know from experience that users (even locked in ones) will find their way to other destinations on the internet. See the folks at AOL if you doubt that can happen.