Lots of folks do stuff around the web that is outside of Facebook. For instance, i post lots of Flickr photos and i save web sites to delicious. I’ve always loved the Facebook News Feed as it does a good job of letting me know what my friends are up to. Today it got even better because Facebook now allows me to add Flickr, delicious, Yelp and Picassa actions into my mini-feed. Nice
This is great for a variety of reasons. First, it shows that facebook isn’t the walled garden that AOL was. Facebook is a walled garden, but only for certain things (social graph, photos, social messaging, etc.). For everything else, they are willing to open up and reciprocate. They made a platform to allow users to interact with their assets (people) and have a messaging feature so emails can come in and out but not replace. If they were a basketball team, they may not go around the country and play everyone but at least now they’ll let other come to their court and play a game.
Second, it shows they aren’t trying to be everything to everyone. It could be very easy for Facebook to believe that they can build better products than everyone else and try to compete. This is what AOL did for email, video, destination sites (Sports, News), communities, photos, maps, music, etc – and they lost big. Facebook is clearly maintaining its focus on social activities and even recognizes the difference between their photo app (social photo sharing, not for storage) and Flickr’s (photo blogging, archival) and embraces that. Kudos to them.
Speaking of handing out kudos, you should watch this video (below) of Andrew Bogut’s high fives after his free throws. Not everyone is that eager to congratulate someone.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc11PUnFgkQ]
