Facebook - an educational tool?

When I first signed up to Facebook, only a few weeks ago, I found the interface a little annoying, because they wanted me to fill in my favourite books, and upload my photos all over again. Why would I want to do that when my photos are already on Flickr and my favourite books are already on LibraryThing?

Now, Facebook is letting it's users write APIs (application programming interface) which, means that these problems have been solved. I can now pull my photos and other information into my Facebook profile using RSS feeds. I can even share YouTube videos and other media using Splashcast.

One of the things I like about Facebook is the privacy it affords, as opposed to MySpace, which is visible to anyone.

Martin Weller has written an interesting post about Facebook as a learning environment. He says

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Technology acts as a pull factor - I've gone back to Facebook because I wanted to see what new widgets they had (I added in the LastFM one). This demonstrates something I was talking about with the openlearn guys last week, that is by doing fun stuff with technology you drive traffic to your site from the users of that technology who are keen to see how it is being used. In educational terms this means doing fun stuff with educational content so that people want to see what you've done with Google maps, or twitter say.

The social network is the starting point - rather than content being the main focus and creating a network around this, Facebook demonstrates that the network is the key asset, and then you add value to this.

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