Facebook status lines and Twitter’s Tweets are the current behemoths in allowing users to start a conversation with friends, family, colleagues and strangers. On a very simplistic level, they almost act like a contact management system, like Outlook with a broadcasting feature. For all the growth, social sites and Twitter are being co-opted into dashboards (like TweetDeck and seesmic), allowing users to filter, follow and interact with their multiple circles of friends in one place.

Facebook has clearly seen the writing on the wall, working closely with these dashboard providers to ensure they are integrated, and focusing their efforts in leveraging the huge network of users in other ways – namely via Facebook Connect (tying users activity outside of Facebook back into the friend feeds, ensuring you don’t need to leave) and the recent news reported by Eric Eldon at Venture Beat about a new payment system (http://venturebeat.com/2009/05/11/facebook-to-test-virtual-currency-with-developers-in-a-few-weeks/).

If Facebook follows through and launches a payment system using a virtual currency (like credits) that is as easy to integrate into other sites ala Facebook Connect, it not only succeeds in making payments simple and moving towards profitability, but provides Facebook a chance to avoid becoming the next AOL (a company that defines a space but then gets left in the dust once the walls come tumbling down).