My friends are my clothing. I feel naked when I enter a new social space, so I get dressed as fast as I can. A Walled-Garden-of-Eden makes it easy to run clothed up and down the ladder of expression, across communication modes. facebook's value is in helping people develop and apply their social graphs.

The rumor mill suspects facebook will launch their own private IM service. After Skype's partnership with MySpace to federate IDs and enable voice calls in MySpace's IM client, will facebook partner with Skype too?

Inside Facebook's Justin Smith wrote Facebook wants to own communication with your friends. About chat:

With the exception of Google Talk, it’s been years since most people have experienced an improvement in synchronous communication. While Facebook hasn’t announced any chat products yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did soon. Chat is just a better experience around your social network - most of the time, people want to talk with their friends. Just as Google Talk has probably significantly increased the number of people using IM, so could Facebook…downloading a client and exchanging odd handles is an experience that’s just too complicated for some people.

Justin concludes:

... people will always stay most engaged with services that provide the most value, and core communication tools [news feed, messaging, wall, chat] are some of the services that can be most enhanced by ownership of the social graph.

I concur. facebook has a measure of lock-in (since folks don't want to start over naked).

Let me suggest there's more value in social network portability than in social network lock-in or holding your social graph hostage. When you let people travel with their clothes on, bringing their friends along to your site, you can do more to keep them happy and engaged. I'm starting to think DataPortability is for customer acquisition in the 21st century what virality was in the 20th.

Data portability is the new viral.