Facebook vs Twitter?

The homepage of Facebook is changing yet again, only this time it’s to target their new social networking rivals Twitter.

They plan to allow users to see updates from their contacts in near real time. It is clearly an attempt on Facebook’s side to compete with the increasingly popular Twitter, which grew by 752% over 2008 and is predicted to grow even more throughout 2009.

Facebook has always been a breeding ground for interactive web, but now Twitter has moved the focus from meager interactivity to a more real-time web. Twitter is currently leading the ‘now web’ era, which is argued as being the next coherent step for social networking. It is also something that Facebook are clearly eager to implement into their system, with their latest set of changes.

The biggest change announced is the streaming of “posts from your friends in real-time.” as mentioned earlier in this article. However, that’s not all Facebook have planned for the homepage, they are also changing the “What are you doing right now?” status prompt to “What’s on your mind?” This clearly another a obvious attempt to instigate a more real-time interaction, pushing it one step further than Twitter’s “What are you doing?”

They also intend to banish the limit of 5,000 friends as well as the Facebook ‘Pages’, which would classify users as ‘fans’. Instead they now plan to have one type of profile with an unlimited amount of friends for everyone, whether it’s a band, star or corporation. Facebook has discouraged this kind of interaction in the past. However, with the success of a standard profile for everyone on Twitter that enables people to catch up with the lastest news from their friends, heroes and favorite brands. Facebook have blatantly felt the pressure to move away from their previous beliefs and adopt ones more suited to today’s needs from social networking.

Although at SJL we see Facebook and Twitter as two different social networking sites for different usages and many would argue there is little that would bind them as competition, it is apparent that Facebook have felt the need to up their game in case Twitter ever chose to evolved into a more comprehensive social networking site, and to also stop themselves from falling behind on the predicted ‘now-web’ evolution.

This is notably a smart move by Facebook, but is it all a bit too late? With the rapid growth and huge interest from developers, Twitter should remain unsettled by the latest Facebook changes. If it anything it is more likely to put Facebook users off initially with this being their second major change in under a year. The last set of changes in July 08 had a huge backlash from a substantial amount of Facebook users and it is pretty much pre-written that there will be another revolt when these changes are introduced.

See Facebook’s latest changes here..

What are your thoughts?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 8:23 pm and is filed under General . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.