Major Facebook Announcement Thursday: Facebook Platform

Yeah, exactly. It's remarkable to me that people haven't done cooler things with the Facebook API thus far. So much interesting data there... so much potential for quantitative social network analysis.

This is where MySpace has failed -- they sacrificed data integrity for rapid growth. Facebook, on the other hand, was careful not to fall into this trap... connections on there still mean something. (They go so far as to discourage you from "friending" folks that you don't really know.)

It's a smart move on the part of Facebook to leverage this advantage, by cultivating a developer community around their data.