Update: File it under “great minds think alike?” Paul Kedrosky also thinks that there’s something “special” brewing with Facebook, as he likens it to the Microsoft Office of Social Apps — then goes one further and says “Facebook has an operating system substrate to create lock-in.”

Liz Gannes of GigaOm said it best about Facebook’s new developments: the opening up of its network allows them to function as a social operating system. I coined my own deepjive-ism a few days ago when I wondered whether or not these upcoming changes would function as “reverse-API” – where Facebook would allow *other* companies to build widgets *in* Facebook. Well, it looks like this is in fact the case, but where I was wrong was that widget builders wouldn’t be left out of the monetary side of the equation at all. Rather, according to several reports, Facebook is happy to allow these companies to put up their own ads, or even sell their own stuff, and therefore in a very real sense, share the wealth.

Hmm … opening up your programming structures — and in Facebook’s case, their most valuable asset, their incredibly growing network — to allow other companies to create programs and software to integrate and ride on *top* of …

Reverse-API? Ok, but it also sounds like an operating system, doesn’t it?

And I think that with the allowing of other companies to share in the ad revenue, this creates an entirely equitable situation that will only drive companies to want to participate even more — particularly smaller ones who might not just use Facebook as a lead generation device, or, ones who want to create widgets or dynamic environments that don’t hinge on click throughs or integration with separate sites and databases.

I’m happy to play the cynic most times, but I don’t think that this news can really be underestimated.

Facebook is a force of nature — especially here, in Toronto, where it seems everyone and their dog is on Facebook (on any given day at Work, which is by no means a technical place, I might hear the word “Facebook” at least 2 or 3 times in random conversation) — and as it reaches its tipping points in different geographical and socioeconomic strata, that fact is going to be more and more self-evident.

The companies that partner up with Facebook are going to have a field day with this type of integration, and I suspect they are going to get absolutely mammoth results — if for no reason than the network effects are so large to begin with.

And once they *do* — and the results from marketing, lead generation, conversion and sales all start dribbling in, this is going to only get larger and noisier.

With Facebook standing in the middle of all that and probably acting like the biggest tollbooth this side of Microsoft — heck, with this kind of future, I guess I might turn down a billion dollars from Yahoo as well.