The Unrelenting Twitterization Of Facebook Continues

If you cast your mind back a year and think about Facebook you will remember a very different service. It was all about sharing photos, keeping in contact with your friends and even poking people. All the stuff like apps and videos were also there but the site felt very static, not very “real time”. What happened next was that Facebook being the smart people they are started to worry about the rise of Twitter and did what all good businesses do and were nimble on their feet and reacted to the threat from a major competitor. The first thing they did which most big businesses consider is they tried to take Twitter out and buy them but those talks fell apart. They then did the next best thing which was to buy a similar service, Friendfeed which was clearly a talent acquisition that would help them bring a more “real time” nature to Facebook.  We wanted to take a look at some of the features that are making the Facebook experience seem more and more like Twitter by the day…

The New Retweet Style Function On Facebook

One of the features that makes Twitter as powerful as it is as a communication and news sharing tool is the Retweet button. Users can share information and quality links and breaking news can be shared all over the world in a matter of seconds. The power of the retweet has not gone unnoticed at Facebook. Just last night they rolled out on of the biggest challenges to twitter by making it easier for links to be shared on Facebook with a new feature that essentially replicates the Twitter retweet feature. The feature only works for links at the moment but as that is what the majority of people share on Twitter this could be a huge play. You may have seen more and more blogs add “share on Facebook” buttons to their blogs and this is sure to increase the fluidity of link sharing through Facebook. Sharing people’s links to your own newsfeed on Facebook could not be easier…

Find a link you like

You’ll see lots of links popping up in your own stream that you will find interesting and want to pass on to your friends. As soon as you do find one simply click on the share button.

Share it with your friends

Simply add the message that you want and tell all your friends why you like that link. This works in the same way as the retweet button on Twitter except for the fact that you can add more of a message that 140 characters.

There it is on your profile

With one click of a button you have shared a link to the couple of hundred friends that you have on Facebook. If the content is interesting the idea will be that your friends will also share it and that is when the viral effect will come in to play.

Privacy Settings

You may have noticed that there was a huge stink being kicked up recently when Facebook started “encouraging” you to share as much of your data as possible not just with your friends but with the world at large. The main reasons for this are search, plain and simple. The reason that Twitter has crazy valuations and the public at large so excited is their ability to have real time search and find out what people think about pretty much any subject. Facebook used to be very private but private is not great for search, to have great search you need all of the data to be publicly available as it mostly is on Twitter. Facebook have not quite nailed real time search yet but they are getting there and it will soon be a great way of examining sentiment across different demographics.

Facebook Lite

This was rolled out last year originally as a way for people from countries with slower Internet connections to be able to access Facebook and make better use of it but the similarities with Twitter are striking. The lite version of the service focuses on streaming data and when teamed up with something like this new sharing function is about as close to a carbon copy of Twitter as you can possibly get.

The Live Feed

We take the live feed for granted on Facebook now even if there was a lot of stink kicked up about it when it was put front and center in September of last year and made one of the key elements of the Facebook experience. The live feed replaced the vastly popular news feed and was the biggest attempt to replicate the Twitter experience to date and turned Facebook from a very static site in to something that felt alive and moving in a “real time” nature.

The @ replies

We wrote about this when it launched and although the function is used by some people it has not replicated the same sort of response as it does on Twitter. Mentioning people will still show up in their news stream but to date I have only seen this technique used by marketers and more technical people. This was one of the more direct attacks on Twitter that was just not embraced by the Facebook crowd.

What’s Next?

Well short from copying the logo there is not much more that Facebook can do to keep on replicating twitter. If they can get it right (and early indications are that they can) and people start sharing data and passing on links in real time then Facebook will become a far more compelling place to spend time and find great content. Don’t forget Facebook is nearly 8 times bigger than Twitter, has lots of rich content abilities and crucially already has mainstream appeal. I personally think both services will sit beside each other and offer slightly different experiences but there is no doubt that Facebook has been incredibly nimble over the last year, spotted a huge danger in Twitter and copied nearly all of it’s best bits and is crucially nearly already profitable. Very smart on their behalf I would say.

Tags

• Facebook
• features
• friendfeed
• news feed
• real time
• retweet. replies
• Streaming
• Twitter
• twitterization