Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook

Facebook announced the opening up of their news stream to developers today, allowing for all sorts of new, fancy whizbang desktop clients to be developed using the Facebook API. The immediate impact of this annoucement is that existing applications such as Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck, Adobe Air apps which already have rudimentary access to the Facebook firehose, will now gain even greater functionality, and possibly have some very cool applications and advancements in the very near future. Mobile apps will also likely see a huge boost. Imagine a full fledged iPhone/Palm Pre/Blackberry application, integrating the Facebook news feed into a stream with other services, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.

Of course, this comes with a caveat. The stream of data which developers can access can be mixed around, messed with, and generally tossed around, but in the end, this information can only be displayed BACK to the original user. So, really, in the end you’re getting the same old Facebook news stream you had before, simply displayed back to you in an altered form. While this is still pretty cool, it doesn’t offer the same type of openness and coolness that Twitter and similar platforms offers.

Another aspect of the newly opened up Facebook is how applications and their access will be treated in the future. Will Facebook applications move into the desktop, and run as web apps within the applications developed? Will current games and applications integrate the Facebook news stream more tightly to the processes? Potentially, Facebook could become a unified social profile and identity, when combined with Facebook connect, that other services such as Disqus (which we use as our commenting engine here at Geek Troika!) are attempting to do.

The annoucement by Facebook represents a pretty big step forward, since the service has always been pretty dramatically closed and shut off. What the future holds for Facebook beyond a social service will be part of what defines it as a larger aspect of our social and Internet lives.

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As I engage across various social networks, there’s been an interesting sort of trend/pattern/whatever developing that I’ve noticed. The tends to be an older audience skew for several social media products which pop up across the Internet. This isn’t a hard and fast rule - plenty of young people are on Flickr and Facebook, for sure - but for some of the major networks I participate in, I definitely detect an older set of users. For the longest time, the people I saw using Twitter the most, with the greatest frequency, were individuals in their mid thirties to late forties. This is further exacerbated on a site like FriendFeed, where the overall demographic is a bit wider, but the skew is still towards an older audience.

What is the reason for this? There’s no clear answer, really. I speculate that younger people (from my age bracket on down) are lazier, and don’t want to invest the time on establishing an entirely new network on a new service. Facebook works fine for most needs, since almost everyone a young person knows is likely on Facebook. Twitter is a wildcard, especially for its limited set of features. FriendFeed has the same sort of problem: since FriendFeed aggregates feeds from all of your different presences, it’s kind of pointless to jump on the service involvement only really exists in one form on one service (Facebook).

Lately, there has been an influx of younger users onto Twitter, but Twitter at this point is where Facebook is when it opened itself up to high school users: a tested proving ground, populated by savvy users with an understanding of how the service operates. I speculate it will take a much longer period of time before you start seeing seventeen year olds appearing on FriendFeed or Brightkite.

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