I"m spending a few days in Los Angeles visiting my daughter Christina. Daddy visits here are fun, I become full immersed in the the lives of her and her friends.

That means eating in back-alley eateries, using the LA Metro for transportation and hanging out in lofts downtown or apartments in Korea Town.

I love being with the kids, which is a misnomer because they are hardly kids anymore, they are all in their 20's.

I learn a lot during a trip like this, yesterday it was quite an epiphany.

I asked if they thought Facebook was still cool.

The answer that came back was 'nope, but its still the central place where all our apps upload to"

Bing!

Looking at my own Facebook "newsfeed" (yes I have an account, but only to keep tabs on what Christina is doing and to terrorize her friends) and indeed. Most of the 'posts' I see are uploaded via third party apps.

Twitter, Instagram, Tweetdeck, Tumblr, Path, the list is endless.

So Facebook is effectively being used as an aggregator of feeds

Wow, its a River of News!

Now, if all these external apps have an rss feed (many do) then it might not take much to disrupt the facebook monopoly by presenting an open, customizable, all encompassing aggregator that would have the built-in capability to display millions of feeds already available

Yes, "likes" and one-click 'friending' or 'following' is still a hurdle, but comments and RT's are already working on Dave Winer's OPML Server, that I use for my own Rivers. Notice That this is how I already consume twitter tweets

I'm buying the kids dinner tonite, who knows what I'll learn :-)

 6/11/2012; 6:38:11 PM.   .