Facebook
recently announced a few changes to their status update system that closely
replicate Twitter’s
offering:
-
Your friends’ three most recent updates on the
home
page -
A
brand
new page to see all your friends’ updates at once - An RSS feed to put your friends’ updates in your reader of choice
-
The ability to subscribe to a friend’s updates via
SMS -
The ability to easily update status from your phone by
sending
an SMS to Facebook starting with the “@” character
Among my non-Twitter converted friends, the toughest group to convert after
Luddites is Facebook users. Their basic response is, “Why would I need a service
like Twitter do do what I already do with Facebook?” That together with, “all of
my friends are on Facebook, so what do I need Twitter for?” are the two most
common push backs.
When I look at Twitter, I see a crowd who was out of college before Facebook
came along. They see Twitter as a cool service, but only because they weren’t
already locked into Facebook through years of network building.
Considering that Facebook offers even more Twitter-like functionality in the
form of SMS subscriptions and status updates, their case for standardizing on
Facebook appears to be even stronger.
