David Sacks makes this argument in a recent guest post on TechCrunch. He's see the evolution coming from the browsing of portals to search-based portals and now to a portal which your social graph pushes information to you. He sees the Facebook Platform as the example of the last step.
Obviously I'm a little biased because of my involvement in developing a traditional portal but I don't quite buy Facebook as the end-all application. Yes, it is seeing some tremendous growth and people are building some great things for it but that does not mean this is exactly what everything will look like in the next few years.
That being said, now is a great time to build an application for the platform. All you have to do is look at iLike and the gains they've made since the launch of their application. They've seen amazing user signups and usage. I would love to see us put something together which could show off some of the newer applications we've been developing. They can be hidden behind the monolithic portal application unfortunately.
And perhaps that's one of the keys of this new idea, that you are going to see mini-apps handle different things, you'll be able to pick-and-choose these apps and if they are done well, have some sort of sharing aspect to the data. That could be an evolution if we let it.
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