Earlier today I said, "Twitter : Facebook :: 8 million : 175 million. Yet facebook wants to be like Twitter. Twitter = Mac, Facebook = Windows?"
This coming Wednesday
Facebook is said to be rolling out its latest redesign which emphasizes focus on status updates or life stream. When friends update their Facebook whether it is to add or remove a photo, video, tag a familiar face on a photo, insert a new status update, adds a new note, or anything else for that matter, you will be able to see them through a stream of updates not too different from Twitter except you'll have photos and whatnots whereas Twitter is purely text.
What I find funny is that what Facebook is doing is essentially going head to head with Twitter by putting status updates quite literally front and center and adding several much-requested features that Twitter, up until now, have yet to indulge such as live updates, filtering, and grouping.
While Facebook claims 175 million active users on its
press room page, unfortunately Twitter has yet to reveal its actual figures. According to
compete.com, Facebook has over 73 million unique visitors per month while Twitter has just a tad under 8 million. Until Twitter unveils its figures, we will have to make do with third party analysis. I've included comparison with Friendster which is supposedly the most popular social networking site in Indonesia.
Anyway, the popularity and significant growth of Twitter caught the eyes of Facebook which
reportedly offered to buy them for $500 million which Twitter declined. Facebook began rolling out Twitter-like features such as making the status update component much more prominent and starting to ask its users, "What are you doing right now?" as opposed to Twitter's, "What are you doing?", a short while prior to the purchase offer.
While Twitter started out as a broadcast system, they've added communications features at the request of users, directly in the status update system, unlike Facebook's email-like mechanism which is separate from the primary stream.
To me this all seem like a déjà vu. Windows certainly has the dominance over Mac OS but many people who've used Macs say Macs are easier to use and more practical, and as we've witnessed over the last 20+ years, Microsoft have been trying to emulate and adapt the Mac OS usability and interface. They kept pushing thse into its own products while Mac OS users relentlessly extoll the virtues of their chosen system instead of dealing with system security breaches.
So after Betamax vs VHS and Mac OS vs Windows, will we be seeing Twitter vs Facebook?
Oh, one last point, please take a look at the screenshot of Koprol, an Indonesian version of Brightkite which looks eerily similar to Facebook's new layout. Keep in mind Koprol has had this interface since they launched in February of this year. Facebook has only revealed its design last week.
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