Another distraction has been Facebook. Very popular in London, it does draw a rather neat feed of all your friends activities. It also has a nice API that allows you to pull in external content, such as Twitter or Flickr. However, there's no way they're letting you pull content out easily.

A good example is the news feed from your friends¹ - it's a perfect candidate for RSS. But no, you're stuck with visiting their site. And their messaging service is just as bad: while I have a perfectly good IMAP inbox they insist I use the parallel one on their site. It doesn't help that their e-mail notifications of new items are rubbish.

Likewise, you can't replace things - Twitter and Flickr sit alongside their photo and status apps - there's no way to use something more open.

Now they've a critical mass they probably don't really care. It's all very trendy, people are going to use it anyway. And other more reluctant people will get dragged along by the tide. The downside is that once something new comes along people have no choice but to jump - rather than making access to data open and allowing users to pull an environment together they leave users with a simple choice: buy-in, or don't. Great when you're on top but as MySpace have found it won't save you from the competition.

¹ Is anyone else driven mad by people you've never encountered before wanting confirmation as friends? Or is this a cultural thing?