Unfortunately, Facebook is the local maxima that most of my friends are stuck at. And I neither see that changing, nor Facebook becoming more open any time soon.
I would imagine that the average reader of Hacker News uses a few web apps already. The point of my article was that Facebook doesn't play well with anyone else. They do an amazing job at their core function, connecting people, but they should give it a rest with all of these half-assed implementations of existing functions and focus their efforts instead on making it easier to integrate with Facebook.
I have to strongly disagree that their implementations of existing functions are half-assed. I, and many people I know, communicate more with Facebook's messaging service than email service.
I would also argue that the user experience is considerably better than performing the same communications via email clients such as Gmail. Their photo sharing service is also highly adequate for my and other's needs. I have never considered creating a Flickr account because on the whole I think the centralization of features by Facebook outweighs any benefits provided by additional features in Flickr.
Perhaps you view these Facebook features as superfluous however for me they are the reason I use Facebook so much. I deliberately decide to message my friends using Facebook instead of email. I deliberately log in to Facebook to see if any of my friends have posted any new photos. The supposedly core features of Facebook like the profile and the wall are things that I rarely use.
I have a feeling that we may be 'violently' agreeing with each other.
