Facebook has grown into a power to reckon with no doubt about it, but its mass approach, to sweep every possible person into its molds is something that worries me. I am afraid it will end up becoming another Orkut. Or it may not. But this post is not to discuss where Facebook is going but an afterthought based on yesterday’s facebook plan to upgrade the fan pages.

Some experts say this was coming, this was expected. Facebook is retiring FBML, the reason? We can all only guess. One of the quotes I heard on a tweet meet was that facebook got jealous of people making more money using the FBML fan pages than facebook could itself make. To some extent this is true. A recent survey shows that around 8000 businesses were successfully thriving on facebook fan pages and FBML and many many Individuals. From designing FBML fan pages, to plugins, polls, contact form, CSS layouts, tabs, analytics and much more. Companies like Poll daddy, Iwipa and many other big names will get a blow and will need to redesign their business that were tailored for facebook.

“People were getting too comfortable with FBML and facebook is not going to give it out to people” says a friend of mine who is newbie social media addict but a very good critic and a born analyst. This is very true. Others also say that the day facebook announced changes to user profiles, they guessed that fan pages and groups will be next.

There is a positive side to this. Facebook will grow from being a markup language based web to a more structured and organized IFrames oriented system. These changes also come in the wake of the newly announced Facebook mail. Technical analysts and bloggers say that facebook wants to include fb mail and possibly be integrated with facebook fan pages there by giving a chance to the development on Mini sites and inbuilt websites for businesses. If this analysis is true, google is in for a huge blow. For if this comes true, then facebook will monopolize the web; at least the business end of it.

All I can say is that I find us to be at another interesting turn of history. All we can do is wait and watch and may be even contribute when history is being made. For all we know, a new power may rise and take away the glory from the facebook, apple, google and others of their sort.

This post was originally written for Blogjunta and has been reproduced here with permission.