The most interesting, underutilized and least known aspect of Facebook's platform, imho, is the fact you can export Facebook data to other sites and other commu

The most interesting, underutilized and least known aspect of Facebook's platform, imho, is the fact you can export Facebook data to other sites and other communication systems (albeit in a limited way). O'Reilly's been blogging about this lately. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/mark_zuckerberg_facebook_backstage.html http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/mark_zuckerberg_fa... "I do think that there are two views of the social graph, though, and how it gets deployed: there's a platform view in which it can be exploited to build smarter applications on Facebook; there's a deeper view in which the Facebook-discovered social graph can be accessed by other applications elsewhere on the net. Facebook's granular control of what information you reveal and to whom is thus a key part of the platform -- but the question is how far Facebook will go in letting other sites use this information. If Mark's answer is the first, Facebook is ultimately a closed platform; if the latter, it becomes a true open platform and value enabler." Here's a relevant post to that: http://gigaom.com/2007/10/18/big-internet-is-web-20s-os-so-who-owns-the-apps/ http://gigaom.com/2007/10/18/big-internet-is-web-20s-os-so-w... The Economist article also confuses news feeds (your friends actions, on your FB homepage) and mini-feeds (your own actions, on your profile page). Makes you wonder if the author has actually ever been on to Facebook. Perhaps there's less to The Economist's analysis of Facebook than meets the eye?