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Facebook is Gunning for Twitter

Posted by admin On October - 4 - 2009

While it is hard to argue that聽Twitter聽is merely a fad and will soon blow over, we are beginning to see signs that opinion-polarizing micro-blogging service’straffic may have peaked. As if that news wasn’t bad enough, now聽it appearsthat the 19 million member strong social networking site聽Facebook聽may put an end to Twitter.

Facebook made some changes to the way they display users’ statuses on their site on Friday. All three of the changes are very important because they are directly targeted towards micro-blogging services such as聽Twitter and Jaikuwhich have garnered a lot of attention and have developed a loyal following in the past few months.

The first change on the list is a聽newly created page聽that aggregates the status updates of all your friends (need to be logged in to see). One look at this page and you can clearly see the similarities between this and the previously mentioned services.

msaleem_twitbook2

The second change is the ability to subscribe to the status updates of any of your friends via an RSS reader, or via SMS. You can collectively subscribe to the updates of all your friends by going to the ‘posted items’ page, clicking on ‘my friends’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posted items’. And conversely, you can subscribe to any one friend’s updates by going to that friend’s ‘posted items’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posts’ from there.

The third and most important update is the ability to聽post status updates from your cell phone聽to your Facebook status page.

msaleem_twitbook31

Given Facebook’s generally liberal stance on their聽open API聽I have no doubt that developers will come up with a similar arsenal of tools that currently exist for Twitter-like services, rendering them largely superfluous. This instance, coupled with聽Google’s recent move to replicate StumbleUpon聽does make me wonder more about the perils of developing any new service right now.

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One Response to “Facebook is Gunning for Twitter”

  1. AFC News says:

    I was let down with the last Gunners game the other week, hopefully we can keep the points up and stay first in the premier league, Come on you gunners!

    [Reply]

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