I was having a beer with a friend of mine yesterday and we chatted about Facebook. He's a programmer who specializes in Windows technology, and he wanted to learn more about Facebook so he could better understand how to meet his clients' needs.

I told him that I saw Facebook and Twitter as like glorified text-messaging tools. I think that's really why those two have become so popular. That is, people see it as "text messaging".

A lot of Facebook users seemed so upset over the redesign of Facebook a couple of weeks ago. But I think what happened is that Facebook is migrating itself away from being a respository of user profiles, to becoming a communication tool. Where user profiles used to be their commodity, it's now status updates and "wall to wall" communication.

I just got a Blackberry Storm the other day because I wanted to test my websites on a handheld platform, seeing that these iPhones and iPhone clones are so popular now. This device has an icon for "Applications". I opened it up, and found one for Facebook. I installed it.

Or maybe what's needed is a dedicated "Twitterphone".

Maybe we don't really need voice over IP. Maybe we don't need phone numbers. We just need our Twitter names. "I'll tweet my dentist, see if I can get an appointment this week".

I guess we've reached an age where people find calling each other on the phone as bothersome. Sending text messages allows us to grab someone's attention without having to bother them.

Websites like Twitter and Facebook are just archives where these text messages can be stored and searched.  ✓