If you don't see a reply button (I think that's a glitch in the site; happens to me all the time), then you click the "link" button up top, next to "parent". That'll give you a box in which to reply.
I'll apologize for the abruptness of my last comment to you. Hopefully you'll understand there was a reason behind it, and that reason is: This debate springs up once a month, and every time somebody new comes up saying Facebook is like MySpace is like Friendster, and every time I feel the need to explain why they're wrong, and it takes an hour and leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I'm a bit of a Facebook fan, and I figure that since most HN users aren't I might as well step in and shout my things.
If you'd like to, I can craft a response to you that addresses that one point specifically. As it is, I spent a good twenty minutes looking for previous things I've said in the hopes that you can get the gist of my argument, and hopefully respond in a non-arsewipe way that leads to fun conversation that leads to us each enjoying the sight of our respective names in future debates.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513550
In 2005 I was working on the quality assurance team for a social network start-up with a pretty neat set of technologies. Part of my goal was to get other people to move off MySpace. The site I was with, Zoints, had a cleaner design, more features, and some parts of it were much more intuitive. People refused to switch. They had friends on MySpace, and they had nothing to gain from switching. Social networks are all about the users, and they were in one basket.
This is important not just as a lesson of how hard it is to make people switch, but of how good Facebook is. Everybody had a MySpace, but they switched over to Facebook anyway. By the time Facebook let high schoolers register, they had 85% of all college students as active users, and half of those were active daily. Now I would suspect it has more than just 85% of all high schoolers registered, and it's leaking down to middle school registration. People at work use it a lot, and as a result entire families are signing up.
Many people here don't ask themselves just how that happened, which is damn shortsighted. I mean, my mother signed up. My grandfather signed up. He comments on my Facebook statuses. My young cousin got an account. And it's not like Twitter, where people want to "tap into a network". It's not like getting a blog. Simply put, Facebook keeps people in contact better than any other application does. It provides an incredible interface. People who know nothing about tech just "get it". They figure out how to write photos and write notes and update statuses and make friends. It's that easy. It's so easy, and so universal, that middle schoolers get them, not just to be cool, but to talk to other kids. Older family members get them to talk to their relatives. My mother currently has a network of 39 friends, including mothers in the neighborhood and friends at work. That's pretty damn impressive.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255532
Facebook becomes just a point for those few times you want to plan things way in advance, or when you just need to vent to friends. It becomes useful in a way. Not productive, but useful. And what makes it useful are the things Facebook built itself: photos, events, notes. Any applications beyond that are only good for amusement's sake. The top app developers get that.