It sounds like yet another way for lame applications to remind me to join so-and-so’s mafia or receive more poker chips.

It is interesting in the sense that they’re looking to grab more of a user’s time even when the user is not on the site. People can be interacting with Facebook in a way that more closely resembles Twitter. The downside to that is that is that Facebook’s business model is driven by ad sales. If more of their users choose to get updates outside of the browser, users don’t see ads. In this scenario, their resources are increasingly consumed (servers etc.) but their ads revenue goes down.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

The fact that they didn’t just use IMAP shows how Facebook is such a walled off garden.

Yet they escape the criticism even Apple (who is generally immune from criticism) gets.

And no, using IMAP wouldn’t open things up to spam, it can still be an internal system with no external ways to send spam (IMAP != SMTP)

Looking forward to the new external Facebook services and hope that facebook is going to include the export of contact data to local mashines with this new “move” into openness!