The "Post-Grad" Facebook
Facebook is rapidly becoming more than just a social network site: it's a social communications hub. Its new support for third-party applications and services is morphing it into a platform for all other forms of online social activity, from talking about movies via the Flixster application or sharing great music via iLike to sharing and commenting on photo collections using Slide.
Each day some one hundred thousand plus people join the network, including most of the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley and the tech world globally as well post-grad adults who want to share and post their thoughts and communications on friends Facebook "Walls."
Pundits are predicting that Facebook may well become the single point of contact with one's online networks, wherever they may be hosted.
One of the most exciting developments on the near-event horizon is the marriage of Facebook with Micrsoft Live Lab's Photosynth.
Photosynth takes a large number of photos of a place or an object, analyses them for similarities, and then weaves them together into a 3-D space that allows you to move from photo to photo by clicking, scrolling and panning around in a way which is completely captivating and immersive, morhing the current flat 2D Web into a captivating virtual world -a graphical 3D space that we navigate with a mouse or a Nintendo Wii-like controller
Photosynth works with pictures, but as Bill Thompson of the BBC points out "pictures are just data and there is no reason I can see why it could not also work with user profiles, web pages, maps or any other form of semi-structured data. I could navigate my social network as easily as I navigate the collection of photos of the Piazza San Marco in Venice that is provided as one of the demonstrations, or move from web page to web page following a breaking news story."
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