Scoble on a Facebook app:

Add that component to your own Facebook Profile and hook it up to YOUR OWN Google Reader shared page (I call it a link blog, but Google calls them “Shared Items.”). If you do, you’ll see a page that lets you see your shared items, your friends’ shared items, and top shared items. Wait a second, top shared items? Yeah! But only from other Facebookers. It shows you top items for the past 12 hours, or 24 hours, or 48 hours, or the past week. And it shows how many times each item was shared.

Here's the part I find fascinating: 10 years ago, there were walled gardens like Facebook that had a lot of members - AOL (and its pre-internet brethren) that had made the jump to the web. There were even primitive social software applications - recall that AIM was initially an AOL only thing.

The nascent "web community" did nothing but talk smack about it. Yet here we are, a decade later - and Facebook is more or less "AOL 2.0". Sure, it's opened itself up to application developers more, but that has more to do with current "fashion" than with anything else.

So here's my question: why was AOL looked down on, and Facebook is admired? Is it as simple as "all the cool kids like Facebook" ?

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