Facebook - social media's new front page?

With content, comment and communities increasingly distributed, it seems that Zuckerberg and co are doing all they can to attract the social media community together by turning Facebook into a single source of conversation.

Alongside a chat facility, Facebook has managed to commoditise Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us and such like into features on their system, as opposed to discreet systems in their own right. The Palo Alto group is also benefitting from a new application from Six Apart - Blog It - designed to broadcast content from Facebook to Tumblr, Twitter, Pownce, Vox et al.

Facebook fatigue was all the rage around the turn of the year, but these moves will be welcomed by many. All your social media are belong to us.

The developments brought to mind Tom Matrullo's recent great post An adjacency of opposites, in which he looks at Clare Hart’s and David Weinberger’s talks at FASTforward08. Hadley Reynolds highlights better than I could the relevant part of the post:

"For David, the core idea of his powerfully evoked image of 'the new front page' is that we have shifted the control of the structure of our information engagement from the owners of the content to ourselves as the community of users of the content."

And if Facebook is the new front page for social media and it's easier to start a conversation with many different communities simultaneously, then what happens next will prove interesting precisely because they are different communities.