About Facebook

Facebook’s announcement in May that it was opening its Web-development tools to outsiders has been the biggest news in the Web world since the arrival of YouTube, in 2005. The announcement came amid a massive increase in the number of Facebook’s visitors—it doubled to 26 million between September 2006 and May 2007—and a growing sense that MySpace’s reign as the unchallenged kingpin of social media was coming to a close.

I still believe that a lot of the “Web 2.0” hype is just that—hype—and that many of the putatively revolutionary advances in sites like MySpace, not to mention the scores of copycat sites still springing up around the Web, will quickly become commoditized (see “The Web 2.0 Bubble,” April Atlantic ). They rely too much on the packaging and marketing of tools that exist elsewhere on the Web, and they lack a compelling retention mechanism, which leaves them open to ...