Missives from the 6th Floor

FB is a modern day BBS.

Light, idle chatter. Games going on which gives people common threads to talk about. Easy multimedia sharing. Twitter is similar, but more in line with microblogging.

For a lot of people, FB is also decentralized social management. I have dozens of casual friends who I don't see too often and months can go by without any kind of significant communication. With FB, I get the 5 minute round up without the overhead of actually having to reply to everyone.

In Silly-con Valley, a lot of people are using FB and Twitter for personal brand management. If you're interviewing two candidates that are otherwise identical, but one has a twitter feed that shows the person is truly up to date on the market/tech/whatever AND they aren't talking smack about former employers, etc. they become the better choice for hire. The alternative is waiting for someone else to speak for you and suddenly you don't have control over the message.

You don't need to make FB your social hub to make it useful. It's just a tool to keep in touch much like following friend's blogs are a tool to keep in touch.

FB only really feels useful once you reach a critical number of other people who also use FaceBook with whom you want to stay in touch. In a lot of ways it serves the same purpose as you mention for LJ, but for people with less to say.

Its also a lot more enjoyable if you start using the little context menu for entries on your wall to ignore game / polls stuff.

Actually, why don't you just add the Movable Type Connector for Facebook to your site.