It looks like Fred Wilson agrees with my valuation of Facebooks and not yours.

So :-P.

http://valleywag.com/336972/facebook-worth-5-billion-7-billion-tops 

The big news today was Bebo creating their own language which mimics the facebook application FBML. The idea was essentially to allow developers to easily port from a Facebook app to a Bebo app. Everyone is talking about it in terms of the Bebo side, but I wonder whether this could be the first tentative step for Facebook to solve the Death problem.

Internet history (all 10 years of it) has shown time and time again that social networking sites do not survive very well. We have seen the coming and going of Friendster and MySpace. There was also pseudo social sites like Xanga and AsianAvenue. Users have shown time and time again that they will happily jump ship and in relatively short amounts of time. So, what is the solution to live?

The answer is, become a platform. I don’t just mean facebook apps, I mean, become the base platform in which everyone else runs. I mean a company like Ning. By allowing others to build the social network, everyone wins. As different networks become popular, Ning will be around as the backend, for users, it means no need to recreate profiles, even for individual networks, it means they have ready access to a large pool of possible users. It streamlines the process of life and death of networks. The main problem that Ning runs into right now, which is where Facebook currently has the great advantage is in sheer size. Facebook already has a large user base, one which social networking companies would give money hand over fist to build off of. If Facebooks competitors all were building their platform off of Facebook’s data, they will always have the advantage. This is in fact what Ning is hoping to build off of.

Still haven’t completely composed all my thoughts on this yet, maybe more to come.

Here is my guess though, if Facebook does not open up more, a lot more than just helping to build a mimic to FBML, you will see Ning (or competitor) begin to win in the coming years.

UPDATE: HERE is someone explaining what I’m thinking in much better words than I can.  Though from the Bebo point of view as opposed to Facebooks.