It's different in that it's not a social network: I don't want friending, I don't want engagement, Facebook also does personal communication in a great way. I just want it to be a good source of basic information on who someone is; answer their question and get them on their way. Another difference is that (partially due to optimizing for engagement) elsewhere it is easy to find someone's most recent actions, but it's also easy to miss out on bigger long term things. I dont want it to be chronologically sorted in such an extreme way. As I say: find out who someone is, and not just what they had for lunch.
It's especially problematic since Facebook's newsfeed algorithm seems to promote posts by exactly those who interact with me a lot on Facebook, which is correlated with living on Facebook a lot, which is (as you said) correlated with how much real life they have to talk about! Missing out on my acquaintances' big life events is one reason I've been experimenting with http://WikiSapien.com/
Very much so; when I was in the market for a REST app, I found tastypie very clean to work with for adding on to an existing project.
(all the major options should be on djangopackages.com)
One of the big tragedies here is the seniority based tenure system that caused a beloved energetic teacher such as this to have to leave the west coast. There was an interesting discussion about this in an interview on reddit with a teachers union president: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/124dur/i_am_the_presid...