At VentureBeat, an assistant business professor weighs in on Facebook. The premise? That Facebook Platform was a strategic mistake.

Of course, like most pundits, Gal gets the basics wrong (as in the sentence where he states that “[developers] then get to split revenues with Facebook”. There’s no rev. share agreement). More importantly, however, he doesn’t understand Platform’s goals.

Platform has never been about user acquisition for Facebook- the site doesn’t have a problem with that. It’s about driving interaction with the site, and by most measures has been an extraordinary success. Just as with Facebook’s translation program, the site uses a strong base to build value for users. That’s always been the goal- not increased user acquisition, as Gal argues.

His second argument is that a large number of platform applications dilute  potential network effects. Again, a wrong assumption. Why? The market is very liquid. Of course, in any market, there’s an argument for monopolized industries. But on Facebook, users have enough access to new applications that they can add and subtract apps as they like (with very little cost). Any analogy to Windows is, by virtue of this difference, inherently flawed.

Of course, we’re used to the pundits making mistakes. It helps that Gal hasn’t bothered with facts about Facebook’s massive traffic growth, which Platform is a huge part of. So, for now, we’ll be sticking to Platform, despite what the assistant professor says.