That's a pretty naive analysis of the situation. A good Facebook app isn't just some functionality shoved into boxes on people's profiles and canvas pages. You actually have to integrate with the site to make it useful.
Any site that does anything remotely social already has it's own friend relationships to help manage that. Putting such a site's functionality into a Facebook app is never going to be as simple as copy and pasting, and if your site isn't social enough to have already necessitated its own friend feature, it's not going to be social enough add any utility as a Facebook app.
"Right now, most of the widgets that are out there are an attempt to squeeze the elements of a service into a neat little sidebar rectangle--a bottleneck created by one-way APIs, limited space, and underwhelming goals."
"... That's a pretty naive analysis of the situation. ..."
I'd say thats more "punk - attitude" than analysis. There is a bigger problem(s) here that the title alludes to. Try reading this article ~ http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/
Any site that does anything remotely social already has it's own friend relationships to help manage that. Putting such a site's functionality into a Facebook app is never going to be as simple as copy and pasting, and if your site isn't social enough to have already necessitated its own friend feature, it's not going to be social enough add any utility as a Facebook app.
"Right now, most of the widgets that are out there are an attempt to squeeze the elements of a service into a neat little sidebar rectangle--a bottleneck created by one-way APIs, limited space, and underwhelming goals."
How does his solution solve that?