For the record, I certainly didn't miss the Facebook news but I can't seem to find any decent coverage on what exactly Facebook will be offering so I'm withholding judgement.

I also want to see how other people in the blogosphere react which is often the most interesting part of any Facebook news.

In particular I'm curious to hear Dare Obasanjo's take on the whole thing because it almost seems like Facebook is copying what Microsoft (and Dare in his day job) has been working on for the last year or more.  It wouldn't be the first time that Microsoft has had a feature before everyone else and not gotten credit for it but if I'm right it would be one of the more frustrating examples. 

Addendum: Dare's thoughts can be found here.  He doesn't mention Live or how Microsoft has been trying to extend presence beyond the social network since day one but perhaps that isn't the point of this on Facebook's part.  Like I said earlier in this post the blogosphere tends to distort Facebook news and having not had time to actually look at the API documentation I'm having trouble matching the reality to the hype.  In the end, all Facebook has to offer is a repository of personal information and a list of contacts.  So technology wise I don't see how what Facebook is doing now is anything other than an inferior version of Microsoft and others have done before (I realize Facebook's userbase makes their participation more valuable but I'm just speaking from a capabilities standpoint).  It just seems to me like everyone is holding up the ability to create information aware widgets as if Facebook had invented it.

I also have to admit to not completely seeing how the fact that this "doesn't require any server side code" is at all relevant.  The attitude among pundits seems to be that this now empowers people with no programming skills to start whipping up Facebook apps like it was nothing.  I don't think that's going to happen. 

Anyway, I'm going to look into this more.  I've long intended to jump into Facebook APIs and really get educated about it so maybe this can serve as the motivation for that.  I'll be the first to admit to a certain amount of ignorance on the subject but right now this just seems  to be a lot to do about nothing.