B. Mann Consulting

Not a big thesis on this topic, just an observation that this evening, as I was thinking about organizing something with friends for tomorrow morning, my instinct was to open a tab and go to Facebook to contact them...rather than email.

And of course, this is exactly what ActiveState's Up4 Facebook app is trying to help with as well.

Update: And of course, today I see that Facebook has added straight-to-email messaging -- "No more switching back and forth between email and Facebook. When you are writing a message, simply enter any email addresses into the “To:” field.". There is a longer post on the Facebook blog about this.

The answer is "probably yes". I just wrote up a description of our Vancouver Drupal Users Group event over on Bryght, but saved the provocative title for here.

I think that maybe I'll lift my stance on only adding Facebook apps that have a "public Internet" face as well. Much as I hate locking data into Facebook, I do want to support local developers: ActiveState's Up4, DabbleDB's DabbleDo, and the soon-to-be-released Opus Player by the Donat Group / Project Opus.

But don't think I won't be continuing to push folks to figure out ways to nicely push and pull data in and out of Facebook in a way that benefits the open Internet as well as respects the privacy and security of user's content within Facebook.

Finally I wanted to share with you that yes, we did indeed continue to chat over beer. The strangest phrase that came up was camel cheese. Nice.