Facebook is Gunning for Twitter

While it is hard to argue that Twitter is merely a fad and will soon blow over, we are beginning to see signs that opinion-polarizing micro-blogging service's traffic may have peaked. As if that news wasn't bad enough, now it appears that the 19 million member strong social networking site Facebook 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 Twitter and Jaiku which 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 newly created page 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.

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 post status updates from your cell phone to your Facebook status page.

Given Facebook's generally liberal stance on their open API 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 Google's recent move to replicate StumbleUpon does make me wonder more about the perils of developing any new service right now.

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Geof Harries, April 22, 2007: It appears that once again that Obvious Corp. will get skunked. First with Odeo, smashed to bits by Apple iTunes, now this. Will they ever succeed?
Ken Yarmosh, April 24, 2007: It seems a lot of people are getting this wrong. This update wasn't released on Friday - but it was blogged about on the Facebook blog then.