Was just reading a post on Ben McCormack's blog which mentioned the announcement that Microsoft have released a new Facebook toolkit. This did come as somewhat of a shock, I mean it's unlike any of the big vendors to play nicely with a competitor. I don't think they ever released a partnership with MySpace and that is based on a Microsoft Platform. They clearly don't see MSNSpaces as a competitor otherwise I don't think this would have been approved internally. I'm starting to believe the hype around Apple being the new Microsoft, maybe they've switched places!

It's an interesting step and will be good to see how this will either run alongside the new Live API with regards to signing in capabilities (Passport) or whether they'll have some smarts to synchronize them up. I guess the Facebook API was simply a web service and they've probably just wrapped that up and then an internal MSFT dev has put together a few WPF components and shown the right people.

I've been doing some extensive research into Enterprise 2.0 and have been following Web 2.0 for a long time. It's interesting to see the links between the two and also how SharePoint comes into the equation in both paradigms. Clearly MOSS isn't really affordable for consumers in the Web 2.0 space, but it is for Enterprise 2.0 - WSS is the less functional option. There's a lot of work being down on CodePlex to build on what is out of the box in terms of Blogs, Wikis, Site Templates etc. and a lot of this is accessible across WSS and MOSS which is great.

The Facebook platform and SharePoint platform are very similar beasts architecturally and in some ways functionality that would run well in SharePoint will likely appear in Facebook earlier on due to the demand and financial opportunities in the Consumer market. The Enterprise will follow slowly afterwards and will learn from the lessons of the "get it out there" approach.