So claims Paul Kedrosky, saying:
In other words, none of the apps are particularly good — photo sharing, status updates, personal pages, events, groups, etc. — let alone being as good as their standalone counterparts — Flickr, Twittr, Typepad/Wordpress, Google Group, etc. — but most people don’t care. They just want their social software all in one place, all from the same interface, and then they want to move on and get their (social/presence) work done.
It’s easy to dismiss this comment as facile and slightly mean. But I think Paul is onto something, especially when, as he notes, Facebook is moving smartly to create a platform layer to tie all these applications together.
A while back, Marc Hedlund wrote a piece about Web 2.0 companies as reinventions of Unix apps. There’s a similar exercise to be done for Windows apps (including the parallels between Marc’s own Wesabe and Quicken or Money). Your thoughts?