Duncan Riley at TechCrunch does his time on the latest story- Steve Ballmer called Facebook a fad. It’s the CEO equivalent of a food fight (and no, not this food fight). Except it might be more serious, if Microsoft doesn’t invest.

Every possible point has been made about Facebook’s community features being more important than its technology. A great example for Facebook’s case? MySpace.

While Facebook greases up its interface with Ajax and slick CSS, MySpace has never bothered at being pretty (or particularly functional). The site is plagued by spam, terrible graphics, and frequent outages. Sure, Facebook has the occasional glitch for hardcore developers. But MySpace performs far worse.

Yet it doesn’t matter. MySpace has continued to grow because of its community, not its technology. The same will happen for Facebook (and its better community controls, privacy, and networks may help it beat out MySpace in the end). MySpace and Facebook prove the same point- programmers can render sliding scroll bars and pop up windows. But creating a community is a little harder.