Of course it only includes Facebook data, not data from third party widgets. To be really cheeky, Netvibes should find a way to include all your third party Facebook widgets ;-) However Netvibes has actually done very well, because the only thing missing seems to be Facebook's news feed - because Facebook does not currently allow outsider providers to access the News Feed. Given that Facebook is not very open (at least outwards), this is impressive. Also it should be mentioned that you still need to click through to facebook to go through your friend requests, group invites, etc.

Brightkite users can choose to have their Facebook status updated and/or publish their location, notes, and photos directly into their Facebook News Feed.

To turn this new feature on, do the following:

1. On Brightkite visit your Account Settings, click on the Sharing tab.
2. Authorize Facebook by clicking the link next to all 3 steps.
3. Choose your Facebook cross-posting options and click save.

Brightkite promises this is only the beginning and that's there's more in store in terms of Brightkite/Facebook integration. We imagine that means they'll soon allow us to bring our Facebook friend list into Brightkite and vice versa.

The power of this integration is precisely why Facebook Connect is rapidly being adopted by web sites across the internet. That, and the fact that regular internet users immediately understand what "Connect with Facebook" means. Unfortunately, "Login with your OpenID" still has them scratching their heads.

Whenever somebody tags you in a status update, a notification will appear. For now, however, there is no place where you can easily find all the updates where somebody tagged you. It is also worth noting that while Twitter actually displays the @ symbol in status updates, Facebook just replaces it with the full name of the tagged person.

Obviously, this now makes Facebook even more like Twitter than ever before. At the same time, though, this is also a very useful feature, as it allows your friends to easily head over to the profile of the friends you tagged in your updates. Facebook's Twitter-like new Facebook Lite interface, however, doesn't support @mentions, yet.

Tip of the hat to Zee at The Next Web for being the first to notice that this feature was live.

Max Kalehoff from Nielsen BuzzMetrics has a good analysis of Facebook today. And next week Read/WriteWeb will explore just how open Facebook really is (as Sam Sethi twittered today, "It's a proprietary silo, no RDFa/mf's , no RSS and no Atom Publishing Protocol"). But for now, I want to do a quick poll of R/WW readers, to see how many are now members of Facebook. Up until a month or so ago, I wasn't. Indeed, today I was "poked" for the first time - by Joshua Porter (does this mean I have to buy him a drink next time I'm in the US?). Anyway here is the poll:

Currently, the lite.facebook.com link doesn't go anywhere and the invites have disappeared again, but just a few days ago, at least this Twitter user got to see it in action (hat tip to MG Siegler for finding this).

Attack on Twitter?

It is interesting to see that Facebook is working on this now, especially given that it only announced the acquisition of FriendFeed yesterday. If these screenshots turn out to be true, then this would be a full-force attack on Twitter. FriendFeed was often heralded as a potential challenger for Twitter, though it never quite got the mainstream traction to fulfill this promise.

Earlier this year, Louis Gray argued that in order to succeed, FriendFeed would have to offer a simplified version of itself. Now that FriendFeed is part of Facebook, maybe the FriendFeed team will get a chance to do just this.

Overall, stripping down Facebook's interface to the bare essentials doesn't seem like such a bad idea. The current interface is getting rather cluttered and if Facebook really wants to emphasize the stream, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Facebook is clearly learning as they go. The platform and company in general are likely to someday be seen as far less revolutionary or effective as they are often said to be today. The newsfeed is just RSS without the acronym and less functionality; the platform is just a highly controlled API effectively leveraged by only a handful of elite apps on an otherwise airtight social network. None the less, stay tuned for more Facebook posts on all your favorite tech blogs!

Attacking Twitter?

As Nick O'Neill on the AllFacebook blog points out, this move can be seen as a direct attack against Twitter. The early success of Twitter, after all, was mostly based upon the availability of an API that allowed for the creation of a thriving ecosystem that went far beyond what Twitter's developers had originally envisioned.

Creating an Ecosystem

Looking at the announcement, Facebook clearly hopes that a similar ecosystem can develop around its new API. As an example, Facebook explains that it would now be very easy for a travel app to allow its users to create and share notes on Facebook with text, pictures, and videos.

Tearing Down the Wall

Facebook is slowly tearing down the wall around its silo and is starting to expose more of its data to the outside, which can only be a good thing. Just this week, Facebook also joined the OpenID Foundation. There are some legitimate questions about what this means for both OpenID and Facebook Connect, but it looks like Facebook is moving in the right direction.

It's a been a busy news day at Facebook. Earlier today Facebook launched a new Twitter-like tagging feature, plus they announced it has open sourced the real-time web development framework that runs its new acquisition Friendfeed.

We're hearing the term "Twitter-like" a lot in regard to Facebook's announcements these days - just as earlier in the year Facebook was apt to copy Friendfeed. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery indeed, but remember that Facebook's user base is still much larger than Twitter's.

It's a tried and true strategy for big Internet companies (ref Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL): copy the best new features from smaller startups and gradually introduce them over time to a mainstream audience. Even though Twitter is nearly mainstream, its only just broken into the comScore top 50 sites in the U.S. - whereas Facebook is now in the top 5.

Rules and Regulations

Here are the rules for the new URLs, which will also apply to the usernames of all newly registered accounts:

• at least five characters
• alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) only (plus a period or full stop)
• users can only choose a single new username/URL for their profiles and each of the Pages they administer (a separate FAQ for Page administrators is available here)

Facebook reserves the rights to "remove and/or reclaim any username at any time for any reason," and will work with intellectual property rights holders to prevent users from claiming trademarked terms as their usernames. This will also give brands a chance to differentiate their 'real' Facebook profiles and pages from potential impostures (even though many of them would probably just be fans).

Obviously, there will be quite a landrush on Saturday, and given how popular Facebook has become, we expect that a lot of users will line up for their vanity URL on Friday night. So if you have a relatively common name, you might want to put this time and date in your calendar.

In January, 20 million people were accessing Facebook on their mobile phones. By September, that number had more than tripled to a whopping 65 million mobile users. As the company continues to upgrade the mobile user experience, the rate of content generation appears poised for unlimited growth. To test the redesigned mobile site visit touch.facebook.com.

With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed's territory.

Facebook will also handle long comment threats very similar to the way Friendfeed deals with them. The feed will show up to 8 comments by default, with the ability to click and show more - which is exactly the way Friendfeed handles this as well.

Facebook, however, is not going to change the order of items in the Mini-Feed the way Friendfeed does. Friendfeed pushes items with new comments to the top of the page. This approach would probably not be too useful in Facebook, where users typically see far fewer items in their feeds than the typical Friendfeed user.

While Friendfeed aggregates items from a far larger pool of services than Facebook and has a lot of features that Facebook still has to copy, it is clear that Facebook is at least getting some ideas from Friendfeed's (and also Plaxo's) playbook here.

Even though Facebook is slowly catching up to MySpace, the gap between the two is still large, with Facebook having a 17% market share and MySpace 72%.

MyYearbook

MyYearbook, interestingly, saw the largest gain of all social networks, a trend we have observed for quite a while now. It grew by almost 320%, though it only has a market share of 1.5%. Its users are also among the most loyal and spend about 30 minutes on the site. MyYearbook, as the name implies, mainly targets the high school market.

England

The data for the UK social networking market is quite different. There, Facebook already has a 45% market share, up an astonishing 172%, while every other major social network there lost between 20% (Bebo) and close to 50% (Friends Reunited and Myspace).

Facebook Still Trying to Catch Up

While Facebook is the fastest growing network and MySpace is bleeding users at a slow by steady clip, Facebook still has a long way to go before it will catch up to MySpace. Even though MySpace has a bad reputation in the blogosphere (though, thanks to some recent initiatives like Data Availability and OpenID integration, this tide might be slowly turning) and Facebook gets a lot of the hype, if advertisers and developers want to reach the largest number of potential users, MySpace is still the place to go for the foreseeable future.

Adium has recently integrated Facebook chat into the beta version of the IM client. The client allows you to see the default profile image and your friend's Facebook status. Unfortunately, Adium is only for Mac OS X (sorry Windows users).

Gabtastik

Gabtastik is a Site Specific Browser (SSB) for web chat services similar to Mozilla's Prism project. Supported chat services so far are Facebook chat and Google Talk. Gabtaskit is available for both Windows and OS X. However, keep in mind that Gabtastik doesn't bring any new features to Facebook chat. You're still restricted to the minimalistic interface.

Digsby

Digsby is a multi-service instant messsaging client that supports an enormous list of services from the usual suspects like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk, to social networks such as Twitter, Myspace and Facebook. Among the plethora of social networks and IM accounts, you can also manage your email accounts via Digsby. Last month, developers of Digsby became the first to take Facebook chat outside of Facebook. Digsby FTW?

Bonus Ways

Other ways to run Facebook chat outside of the social network's homepage include running Facebook chat in your Firefox sidebar or using the Pidgin IM client Facebook chat plugin. On another note, while you can't run Facebook chat in Windows Live messenger (yet?), you can run Windows Live Messenger in Facebook with the Live Messenger Facebook app.

Check out these great tools and let us know what you're using to get Facebook chat out of the walled garden.

The sample set for the survey consisted of 1,000 young people suckered into answering questions and viewing ads at the "analyst" company's website, Brandport.com, and 500 Facebook users - for a total of 1500 respondents. Perhaps our headline should then read "Young Facebook Users Think Facebook is #1." The release is here, I found it via Kathleen Mazzocco.

Last year's #1 spot was held by MySpace and presuming the study surveyed 1/3 of its respondents on Facebook then as well, this is a big change. I can say anecdotally that everywhere I look I see laptops (other than mine) on Facebook all the time. You can read our in-depth comparison of MySpace and Facebook here.

Gender Differences

Gender differences in the survey were marked; use of social networking sites was twice as high in self-identified women as it was in men, only 33% of women said they were satisfied to use just one social networking site and MySpace was the #2 favorite for women while falling out of the top 5 for men.

The survey's authors say they believe this shows that the social networking world is set to change drastically when today's youth replace contemporary adults in the workplace. Social networking is currently believed to be much more common among adult men.

I think a lot of users are going to appreciate this. I'm not so sure about app developers.

Rodney Rumford writes at FB app review blog FaceReviews that this will make the app developers' world a whole lot more competitive, since many apps spread largely through discovery by one friend on the profile page of another. It was via Rodney that I found this news.

So app developers are unlikely to be happy about this. Perhaps demotion of your app is better than having it be deleted?

Time to Throw a Party?

I don't think Rodney's concern will be at the top of users' minds, though. How will they (we) feel? As we read in our recent interview with an early Facebook user, which we think is pretty typical - there's a real backlash against app-overload, at least among long-time users. For some it's a backlash against Facebook apps at all!

On the other hand, many new users may appreciate the apps on the Facebook platform. Apps being hidden will presumably hinder our ability to stumble onto cool new ones. (Like this new near-Dodgeball integration into Facebook, for example.) If you, dear reader, weren't interested in finding cool new apps on the web - you probably wouldn't be reading this blog.

Maybe that's beside the point when it comes to Facebook apps though. They can be pretty annoying. I wonder how many people will move apps but still keep them and how many people will take this opportunity to delete them. I also wonder if few people will take advantage of the new "profile cleaner" and if in fact all of us just pile up detritus on these sites until we can't stand the load, we freak-out and leave.

Either way, I thought you'd appreciate reading about a way to hide Facebook apps - if only on principle!