Cody Taylor

Last week Facebook and Meebo made an announcement to team up. The announcement was latest in a series of policy changes that indicate that IM is finally starting to open up, representing a paradigm shift could potentially lead to a slew of innovations. That is, as soon as the largest remaining holdouts – Yahoo and Microsoft – follow suit.

No one knows just where Facebook is heading with its platform or whether it’s serious about crushing novel new social networking services like Twitter or FriendFeed.

Despite reports that the Internet-enabled Macs at Apple’s retail stores aren’t allowing customers to log on to Facebook, Apple says it doesn’t limit access to the popular social-networking site.

As anyone who has read or written one of the several million lists of “25 Random Things About Me’’ posted on Facebook knows, the things may number 25, but rarely are they random.

Why is the latest mini-phenomenon on Facebook — the 25-item personal list — so compelling?

The biggest surprise (perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising) was that Facebook’s 35-54 year old demographic segment not only continued to grow the fastest, but it excelerated to a 276.% growth rate over the past 6 months.