2:30 PM -- Yesterday was National Facebook Day, by which I mean the social networking giant had a big press event/shindig to trumpet its Facebook Platform feature. If third party development of apps for Facebook is your thing, you can read about it on their press page. But bundled in with that news was the announcement for Facebook Video.

Facebook Video is cool because it's uninventive. It takes all the functionality from Facebook photos and applies it to video: Tag your friends when they show up, link to their own pages and other photos and videos in which they appear. The FAQ (caution, it's a pdf) outlines its lone innovation: an app which allows you to leave Flash video messages for your people. There's even a backwards step built into the functionality: Facebook videos cannot be embedded into other sites.

Despite Mashable's thinking (and they're probably not they only one), neither YouTube nor MySpace have much to fear. The limitations of Facebook make it impractical for the almighty creation of User Generated Content. Facebook Video is a social tool for a social network, and a notoriously restrictive one as well; strangers' profiles are all but impossible to access. The move to video is neither bandwagonism nor a power move; it is just a logical progression.

— A.L. Friedman, Editor at Large, Light Reading