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Hi Marius,

Thanks for contributing. I suppose that the issue comes down to one of stats and hard facts versus beliefs – and as we all know stats dont always win.

I think you are giving Facebook way too little credit.

I’m not, its a wonderful website and tool that i use often.

But these exact arguements were heard during the rise of MySpace, Okurt, LiveSpaces, MSNmessenger, AoL, Bebo etc etc etc.

Nothing lasts forever, and in the internet world, becoming the most popular and staying the most popular are two different things.

The question remains though, and no-ones given me any data otherwise to come up with a case we could debate, how benefitial would spending the time on an FBconnect plugin be for BBpress?

When it comes to instant messenger, MSN has been top dog for ever, contradicting your philosophy about topdogs

Except, that isn’t true!

AoL was top dog for a very very long time. Infact, MSN piggybacked onto AoL’s AIM service for its first 2 years, because by that time, AoL had been top dog for 5 years.

Then Yahoo and MSN were tied for years, infact Yahoo prospered greatly during Microsoft’s failed Hailstorm/myPassport/MSN-messenger-is-tied-into-outlook-express failed rollout.

Its easy to say with hindsight that MSN has always been top dog, but if you were there, you’d know its simply not true.

MSNmessenger really took off with WindowsXP, and as a Microsoft developer at the time, i can tell you that before then its market share of IM chat was alot lower than its percentage of possible users.

Everyone in my country uses MSN, and has for the last 10-12 years

Awesome. Its only been out 9 years though (unless you had Windows ME where this could be in your 10th by 7 weeks), but i’ll not quibble. The problem with these sort of statements is that “Everyone” is a statistical statement that means 100%. I’m confident not 100% of people (that use internet or even instant messaging) in your country use MSN messenger for the last X years.

The same is my issue with these generalisations about Facebook (or any website) once it become incumbant in its field. “everyone” uses facebook, like “everyone” or “most” use MSN simply isnt true.

Facebook has redefined the whole genre of social communication on the internet

I fail to see how it has redefined it actually. Simplified? Unified? Sped-up? I’ll grant you all those.

But publishing data to a group of people who’ve you’ve preselected to be allowed to see said data is not new; Neither is the instant messaging, sharing of photos, emailing each other etc.

It has become so widely used, that it’s incorporated in Playstation 3, Xbox 360, several cellphones, and in many countries – Facebook has been the platform for actual change

Thats a massive leap there mate, loads of things are on PS3, Xbox360, Cellphones etc.

Heck they all have an API so people can develop applications for them.

Bebo is on all of those platforms, are we now suggesting that Bebo is the platform for change? (and btw, Bebo is the # 1 social network in my country – not facebook).

My phone in 2004, and as i recall to some degree my xBox in 2005 – at least in signing in, had MSNmessenger on it. Sharing status updates, chatting, emailling and sending photos. Surely, given that this was on game consoles and cell phones over 5 years ago, this would be far more likely to be the platform for actual change than Facebook (was wasn’t even built then).

I think Facebook is pretty much gonna be the number one social website for a very long time

Again, its based on “i think” and not stats. For the record, I also think the same as you, but when it comes to committing resources, i base them off facts and not randoms hunches. Plus, i’m sure there were countless people who said the same about AoL, MSN, MySpace etc etc.

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I’m real happy for these conversations, but i’m worried that we’re getting away from teh original point. I am not being disparaging of Facebook the website, platform, nor movie (is it still going to be Aaron Sorkin writing??).

But with so many people posting so often about how Facebook Connect should be the top priority/feature in BBpress, i am asking for your data so we can see if its worthwhile