[viae]

I agree with your assessment of the value, but disagree with your conjecture of the solution. It'll take too long to create products that leverage the network and are profitable.

A better short term solution is to sell the data on the user base to mailing houses and other companies that are looking to find more information on their customers. Example target customers are political campaigns, nonprofits, associations, and magazines looking for new subscribers. This is an old fashioned business that has been around for years. It's proven, it works.

FB is headed this way with Connect, but Connect is too muddied, unproven, and relies too much on cooperation with 3rd parties.

A second set of customers, which in retrospect may be what you are referring to, are universities. The alumni network websites of schools are inactive wastelands. Facebook should be marketing walled garden solutions to Universities. Why build your own network from scratch (or expensive off-the-shelf vendor software) when you can just subscribe to a service from Facebook that will instantly give a University access to a huge percentage of their self-identified alumn...