My Dad has Facebook. All my friends have Facebook. I have Facebook. I can count on one hand the people my age I know, that do not have Facebook. The people I met last term in New York and San Francisco all had Facebook.

Anyone who talks about “social networks” today as if they mean anything other than Facebook is being coy, or is deluded.

Classmates and Friendster haven’t been important in years; in the wake of its buyout, MySpace is rapidly losing relevance outside of musical artists using it for promotion.

Facebook is the model of a modern, successful, social website. It hits a very pleasant sweet spot between elegance, user-friendliness, and attention to issues of privacy. But there is one major problem: If Facebook Inc screws up, the elegance and user-friendliness can all go away (some of the new Apps are definitely pushing it), and your privacy might go away, too. Facebook is a closed system; it’s a single point of failure on all three counts. Read on…

The history and bookmarks features of web browsers have traditionally been separate. Which is strange, since they’re conceptually similar. Each is a title and a link. One represents a place you’ve already been, and the other represents a place you intend to visit in the future.

For me, they’re also similar in that I don’t really use either of them. At all. Between Google searches and location bar type-ahead, I’m always able to retrace my steps to something I remember seeing. To manually maintain a bookmarks list would be like manually maintaining a contact list in my email—why do it by hand, when Gmail can simply remember everyone I’ve ever corresponded with, and then guess who I mean as I start typing their name in the to-field?

Mozilla have recognized that power users ignore the two features, and have also seen their fundamental similarity. Firefox 3 will introduce a unified feature called Places, which attempts to bring a more sensible and usable interface to the browser.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for a number of months, however, and I don’t think Places goes far enough. I’d like to propose not only a unification of history with bookmarks, but a complete integration of that unified feature with browser tabs. Read on…