Facebook's big plans

As Windows came to be the platform for all PCs, Facebook aims to be social networking’s platform, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. What he meant was, allow other businesses like widget makers and marketers to come in and add to users’ experience fun little functionalities Facebook can’t create all by itself, Fortune magazine reports. Social functionalities, of course. Fortune gave examples: “Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked….” The outcome, the New York Times reports, “is expected to be a proliferation of new tools and activities for Facebook’s 24 million active users, who have largely been limited to making online connections, sharing photos and planning events.” Here, for balance, is Forbes on how widgets work on MySpace, and a widget maker’s POV from Red Herring. Then, for background, here’s a 40-something BBC tech correspondent’s (fun to read) first-hand experience with Facebook and a general social-networking primer from Independent in Dublin. Meanwhile, social networking’s not abating, USATODAY reports, describing three fairly new versions of it.