"The big challenge for Facebook, as it has been for AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and everybody else who ever ran a walled garden, is to make their “platform” something that sits on the Net and the Web, not something that substitutes for it."

---Doc Searls, stating the obvious quite eloquently in a post that explains why the Facebook walled garden requires time and effort that just ain't worth it to him.

Susan sez: It is more and more obvious that FB is the new AOL, integrated applications and all. Remember that power that AOL had for the populace and how much progress we've made in open standards, distributed data and so on and wonder what's next. Ask yourself what open platforms will arise that benefit from training us all to use the FB tools but will lack their constraints?