My whole family is here and we love being able to be in touch daily and play and communicate with other. Physically we are thousands of miles apart, but here, we are together every day. Here we also can instantly tell how everyone is feeling and what they are going through and need. Instantly sharing lives through video and photos is a godsend.

I am an employer. I can be a ‘person’ with my staff and let them know I care and have interests similar to theirs. In this way I am one of them and they become more caring and productive. Here we can share what the workplace has no time or space for. Facebook brings the ability to spot potential problems and deal with them before they are brought to work. Facebook also provides insight into the abilities of potential employees.

Facebook has become my #1 source of news, information, communication, and maintaining relationships. I rarely need to go elsewhere on the net now…. So, Thank You Facebook Team.

I sure hope they don’t take away the “food fight” application!

More useful apps will have greater staying power. People will eventually tire of the “fun only” applications. There will always be a place for those apps. But from a pure usefulness standpoint; most apps will have attrition after the “newness” wears off.

Why do you use excel or word or powerpoint or any software? Because it solves a problem. Thats where facebook apps will settle out…

My view, which I’m sure most of your readers support, is that Facebook has already reached the tipping point WRT being the MAINSTREAM Social Operating System.

Just like in the early days of graphical user interface operating systems, there were many contenders before, during and after Microsoft Windows’ long march to dominance from Windows 1.0 in 1984 to Windows 3.1 in 1990 and finally Windows 95. The names of these losing graphical user interfaces include Xerox Alto, Xerox Star, Apple Lisa, VisiCorp VisiON, Digital Research GEM, IBM Presentation Manager, Apple Macintosh, XWindows, TopView, etc.

Microsoft took their lead from the DOS world and leveraged it into Windows via the careful courting of the application software developer community. They hammered home that Windows had more sockets in which application developers could plug in their apps and these new applications made Windows more and more attractive to those who had adopted it. No one else could ever release a “better Windows” because they wouldn’t have all of the important Windows applications available on Day One. Microsoft even found a way to dominate in the application space via Excel, Word, etc. and ultimately Office which meant that even if a Windows clone was launched, Microsoft could keep their apps off of the platform and thereby kill it.

Facebook is clearly out to do the same as Microsoft did by building their own versions of the most important apps (e.g., e-mail, photos, videos, groups, etc.). However, they have opened their platform up early enough to application developers to leave lots of crumbs (and even some cakes) around the application table for the 80,000 developer folks who are trying to figure out which of these to go after next.

It now seems unlikely that another Social Operating System will emerge fast enough and be open enough soon enough to catch Facebook. If I were in the number two spot in this market, I would make sure that I emulated the Facebook App API exactly so that any apps written for Facebook would seamlessly work on my platform. Even with this, Facebook probably has some interesting patents/technology in the news/mini feed area that may give them another level of defensibility.

So, while I agree that social networks will sub-divide into sub-areas of interests (e.g., Facebook for democrats, Facebook for families, Facebook for chess nuts, etc.). I think that this will be managed within the Facebook OS via different applications/groups vs. through the creation of new networks outside of Facebook. So, my bet is that within 12 to 18 months Facebook will have 75 to 100 million users and be on the verge of an IPO. This will be when “your grandma and grandpa” and “your employer” finally take notice of Facebook and decide to join. This will then spur their growth to the half a billion user level.

The great news about this is that anyone writing apps now on Facebook has a chance to stake a claim in the very early days of a platform that will swallow the internet and spit out on the other side as something quite new and different. This is what Altura Ventures (see http://www.altura.com) is betting on and we welcome contact at LeeL@altura.com from any Facebook developers with more than 10,000 users.

Facebook proved that there was much more to social network communities than MySpace. However, new sites that aggregate like minded folks in even more narrow niches is really where things are going to go. Facebook may be the current “hot” platform, but content is really the king. If another social network that had many of the same capabilities emerged for categories such as strictly republicans, or Muslims, or lesbians or people that play chess (chess.com is already doing this) then people will gravitate towards the site where the content meets their immediate needs, interests and core values.

A critical aspect of MySpace was simply kids surfing for people to flirt with and maybe in the long run hook up with. MySpace provides an online service that meets the needs of a particular age demographic in a particular point in time in their life cycle. I guarantee vc’s that understand this will continue to fund new social networking concepts that meet the needs of other demographics (someone mentioned families earlier, which is a perfect example). Think of social networks for kids, teens, college, yuppie, young couple, maternity, new family, second careers, divorcees, mid career, executive level, early retiree, retiree, senior.

Now throw splinter it even further with lifestyle, religion, sex, sexual orientation, political affiliation, national origin, sports affiliation, celebrity infatuation,etc, etc, etc.

At the end of the day, social networking has got very little to do with any specific platform or technology. It’s all about how people organize themselves based on their personal beliefs, core values and social mores’. It’s about involvement in a meaningful community. The widgets, wiki’s, Twitter’s, podcasts, etc will all follow them to the next Facebook. People don’t care if it’s called Facebook or MySpace or whatever, it’s all about where their community resides online.

So basically social networking boils down to sociology 101. Who’da thunk?