TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Alexis Madrigal:

So, if tripling the size of the social network to 3,000,000,000 users is not going to be enough to justify its valuation with its current revenue per user, there is only one strategic direction for Facebook to go. It needs to generate more revenue per user. A lot more.

Dead-on. By going public, Facebook will be under more pressure to increase the amount of revenue they generate from each user, and for good reason: even if every human being alive used Facebook, they still wouldn’t make very much revenue. They have no choice but to make more money per user.

Madrigal speculates they’ll increase how many adverts users see and push Facebook Payments. I think that’s right, but it’s only a part of it. I think Facebook wants to be the web platform, the platform that the rest of the web (and real-world businesses) are built on top of. By graphing how the world’s social relationships connect, and by allowing/pushing individuals to share more about themselves and what they do, they could be the most important advertising, public relations and consumer research channel for companies that’s ever existed, and the only platform software developers need to be on.

The latter might be a bit surprising, but imagine if a large portion of Facebook’s 850 million users sign up for Facebook Payments. If Facebook built something which allowed their third-party applications to run on actual devices, and not just the web, wouldn’t that be a great platform to develop for (financially)? Apple’s App Store has been successful for developers because Apple built it on top of the iTunes Music Store, which had tens of millions of people’s credit card information already stored, so purchasing a new application was as easy as buying a song. In March, Apple said they had 200 million iTunes customers with credit cards on file. There’s no reason why Facebook couldn’t equal, or surpass, that number.

So, that’s my bet. Facebook will, at some point in the next few years, no longer be just a social network where people also happen to play games. Facebook will instead be an all-encompassing platform where you can purchase (HTML5-based) applications to run on your mobile devices, purchase goods from other companies, and for companies to “connect” with you. They want to be the platform for the web, the utility people, companies and organizations use to find, communicate with and sell to their customers.

(Via Marco Arment.)