Facebook started out as a college application where students could find each other, build digital renditions of their real-time social networks. (Beyond that, I’d recommend googling their history, as I’m just making it up). Where it is NOW is a clean, well-designed, open-to-3rd-party-applications platform that utterly blows away MySpace as a social networking tool.

I thought about this today. Here’s what you get with Facebook and their 3rd party apps:

• Email client.
• Status client.
• Groups - which permits 1-to-many messaging, discussion threads, im-like interaction.
• RSS support to import your team’s blogs (Your team isn’t blogging?), wikis, etc
• Calendar / Event app.
• Twitter app.
• Flickr app.
• News feed that tells you what people in your “friends” (your team, in our case) have done differently with their account lately.