Facebook made a number of announcements today about changes to its home page, profile pages, and activity streams. Taken together, these represent a concerted response to the rise of Twitter as a real-time message broadcasting system that goes beyond members’ personal circle of friends.
One of the biggest changes is that Facebook is getting rid of the distinction between private profiles and public pages. The 5,000-friend limit will be dropped from the public pages. Facebook doesn’t want Twitter to become the way large companies and public figures connect to fans. Up until now, Facebook Pages haven’t really been the place fans go to connect with their favorite celebrities or brands. For that, they’ve started going to Twitter, where they can get updates in real time.
Facebook is also speeding up the updates that populate the news feeds on everyone’s personal page. Before, these would be updated every 10 minutes or so. Facebook’s introduction of real-time updates and a one-sided follow system mimics Twitter’s functionality. While it may be a little late to this part of the game, its user base of 175 million dwarf’s Twitter’s. Explains CEO Mark Zuckerberg:
What we’re talking about today, is that there’s a philosophical change in that we want to converge these public figures (which are one way) and friends (two way connections).
Throughout the press conference Facebook emphasized the importance of the activity stream along with the social graph (which is the map of social connections between members). Chris Cox, Facebook’s director of product development, put it this way:
The stream is what is happening. We think it is as core as the graph. The graph is the connections, the stream is what is happening.
These changes will become evident front-and-center on the homepage. Says Zuckerberg:
With the new homepage, that will reflect a much faster flow of information.
The redesigned homepage will allow users to sort through and filter their feed more easily. Updates will be able to be filtered by groups, specific friends, family, or by applications. A new publishing box for sharing updates will incorporate the ability to add not just status notes, but also links, photos, and videos. A new widget will highlight items from friends and other connections members interact with the most. In this way, Facebook is trying to strike a balance between its traditional strength as a private communication system and the increasingly public connections being made on the service as well.
On the surface these may seem like evolutionary changes, but the stakes are high. Facebook is trying to shore itself up as the foundation for a living, rapid-fire Web where the line between private messages and public content is blurred. Under no cisrcumstances does it want to cede the thought stream of its users to Twitter. Instead of asking, “What are you doing right now?”, the new status update box asks, “What’s on your mind?” Mix in Facebook Connect, and these thought streams can be collected from all over the Web.
Despite its already considerable size, Facebook is showing how adept it can be in responding to new threats. If Facebook cannot buy Twitter, it will try to beat it instead.
OK OK
we got it
twitter is as of now officially dead
Call me when companies abandon twitter as a distributed OS for communications with the public.
I think they’ll just maintain presences on both.
exactly. I doubt that Facebook will ever be able to match Twitter’s near real-time capability. I mean, just take a look at how people use Twitter and how they use FB.
Twitter: Most people use special purpose clients
FB: Most people use the web page
Special purpose clients are way more comfortable to use when it comes to filtering, search, posting, grouping, administration.
There are many special purpose desktop clients for Twitter, but only few for FB. Regarding mobile clients, there are many clients for both to choose from.
I think FB will stay what it is: A site where you can manage relationships with old and current friends. If it’s about real information streams (not just those silly FB status updates) and news, Twitter is the deal.
Besides: So far, Twitter attracted a nice tech and early adopter crowd whereas FB suffers from the mediocrity of the masses already (plumbers and rednecks simply tend to be less interesting than intelligent early-adopters).
Brands and companies thus will have to be on both platforms (and many others).
re: Cail: “plumbers and rednecks simply tend to be less interesting than intelligent early-adopters”
Yikes. You, sir, are a bore.
Facebook is facebook and twitter is twitter , point? Two different things. Facebook is more part where you can engage with your fam, friends and close stuff to you, on Twitter you can find breaking news, updates on things you never would find on google or FB.
Why still comparing those two?
FB can’t be twitter type , Twitter can’t be facebook..
Deal with it!
your number?
When Facebook starting gaining mass appeal, it was nearly inconceivable that it would ever siphon off huge chunks of MySpace users, and eventually surpass it. Stranger things have happened before…
I think this is a good move for FB. Twitter is on the rise, but it’s nowhere near mass appeal. It’s still in early-adopter land – maybe one could claim its just now starting to cross over to a more mainstream place.
Lots of people still don’t ‘get’ Twitter, but Facebook has been making huge inroads into the general populace over the past few years. People understand it. They might be able to co-opt the masses before Twitter has a chance to be noticed.
Being in tech company one should anticipate the unpleasant moment. If facebook couldn’t start making money very soon its success will be gone, taken by next new thing
Now the greatest challenge for facebook beside finding a way to make money is to fight new innovations!!!
In a time when you have got better advantage that is when you should make more money, not when you are surrounded by competitors!
Gotta agree…Twitter gotta watch their back and they should come up with a solid revenue plan without alienating its core audience…
This may become THE epic battle between two Web 2.0 uber-startups.
May the best social utility win!
c”,
Although not everyone “gets” twitter, the ones that do and that will are the ones that will carry it to the mainstream.
There’s just too much clutter on Facebook if you’re not someone truly trying to reach out to ppl for a purpose/cause/message.
Still a fan of both, tho.
http://www.twit...m/jennydidonato
Got your voicemail.
Exactly… Also, call me when it’s possible to freely search all of the status updates around the world pertaining to a certain term, or when you can view all of the status updates in your area in real time. ‘
Twitter trends and various “nearby” tweet services offer functionality that even these welcome updates won’t offer. These give Twitter a lot more usefulness in creating new, random social connections than Facebook.
To me, the miracle of Twitter is that it’s an astonishing way of connecting with new people that hasn’t immediately devolved into a meat market / hook-up site (thanks to the emphasis on thoughts and de-emphasis on images).
Getting rid of the 5k limit makes sense for publishers like Techcrunch and other celebrities. Sorting thru feeds by groups allows us to manage friends from fans – and see their reactions separately. Realtime is critical. Can Google search become realtime – meaning relevant content is visible immediately? Google limits to just the top publishers.
Does this kill Twitter? Probably not. Twitter will need to move in new directions that is poorly served by Facebook. @Matt brings out one issue – the open database.
The critical challenge is scaled, realtime feeds. Twitter often falls flat on its face. Can Facebook do better? Let’s watch and see.
pretty much
i just heard a big cry from twitter investors like dang
You can’t follow people on facebook like you can on twitter, its creepy there.
As for a business model, Twitter could make millions a year just selling spots on their recommended users list, anyone seen the guy offering 250,000 for a spot for two years right now? He’s right, that spot is extremely valuable, and he’s recommending user guidelines to keep it to, like no more than ten tweets a day so it doesn’t turn into a spam service.
$55 Million
Poof!
Someone is jumping out of a window right about…
Now.
that must be the guy who said ‘no’ to facebooks buyout proposition of $100M + $400M in stocks
What stock? LOL the company valuation is down more than 50% y/y.
I like Twitter better. Dislike Facebook customer service and everyone is using Facebook. If you want to be like everyone else, than follow, if you want to lead, do so. I Twitter.
So you want to lead by using a slightly less popular service?
So, lead by Follow-ing on twitter? *boggle*
Why? Because I can provide a status update in my closed circle of friends rather than communicating with people around the world in real time?
Facebook is full of bugs – when our Page was ‘upgraded’ to the new format, it disappeared so we had to start from scratch with no way to contact our fans. We’ve sent emails to FB, so far with no response. Now that we’ve set up a new page, it doesn’t show up when someone searches for BECA gallery. When we give someone our new URL, it takes them to a Page that doesn’t completely load and it looks like you’re experiencing double vision.
Bugs!
This is most defiantly a smart move by facebook.
Sure.
But I want to throw it out there that this by NO means is the end of Twitter. Once again, Twitter is an open public network, an inherently different best from FB.
This will retard the pace of Twitter growth, but will not prove a long term threat to the viability of Twitter.
except now everyone on facebook has a twitter-like feed with even richer content than twitter. facebook can easily implement publicizing part or all of it and they can offer all the features twitter _could_have_ had, had it the competence to create a revenue stream to hire good engineers with
we should have expected it. last year’s facebook revamp did not add much in functionality. this seems like a real upgrade
Last year Twitter was not a threat. They probably started the planning for last summers refresh a year earlier as well.
thats simply not true, this current ‘upgrade’ leaves everythhing exactly the same as before just rearranges it. In fact, the real time feed from the version they just got rid of was better (faster) and more sortable than the current feed. sure you couldnt sort by friend groups yet, but everything else was more sortable, and still facebook users continue to integrate twitter into their facebook feed, almost all my facebook friends (nearly 1000) now update their facebook status through twitter.
I am interested in the Home page redesign more than the Pages update as being able to sort through and filter feeds more easily is a must. Great news
love the stream concept
Competition leads to better products and we (the consumer) benefits.
What a naive statement.
There will be NO COMPETITION.
Just more or less a monopolist.
It’s called “the network effect”.
You won’t have a choice anymore.
The only way to have a true monopoly in a free market is if that particular product/service is so great that no one can compete with it. If that same product/service starts to decline or doesn’t continue to innovate in the way the consumers want then someone in search of profit WILL COMPETE.
Quick!!!! Hide this from Evan Williams – you just know he’ll be crushed.
Who cares? He’s a douche.
lol goodbye twitter.
found this cool commercial for skins footwear and wanted to share it
I’ve never seen a shoe spot quite like this
http://www.yout...h?v=2BGESe3Dzgw
The people that I have on Twitter are so different that Facebook. I know that most people in Facebook would be totally annoyed by the frequency of my Twitter updates. To services for two different was to communicate. Facebook has too much weight to now start to become the fast response communication device that Twitter has become.
Good point, but I bet fb will implement some sort of filters/tools to deal with this or the culture of all people will evolve and it’ll all blend together eventually. There may be a difference in the people now, but how long will that be the case?
I think Facebook is evolving for diverging audiences and the introduction of Filters indicate the response to this. So if you have people you want to follow like Twitter, you’ll be able to set a filter or a friend group to follow those streams. “Traditional” users who won’t want that distraction, will be able to filter that out… I can only guess.
great move.. should be interesting to see how its actually implemented.
Sounds like becoming tweetsbook
I’ll always remember our time together twitter. t’was never meant to last…all good things…
(…ROFLMMFAO)
Good, you sound like a boring follow anyway. Have fun loading status updates in your circle of friends only!
You’re exactly the type of person I’m glad doesn’t use Twitter
Keep spamming on facebook. Hasta la vista, baby.
You narcissistic retard.
Is there a date for these changes? I’m still getting the same look as before when I login.
For all those people here proclaiming twitter’s demise, do not underestimate the power of simplicity. Twitter does one thing and does it really well.
Which is why I have a Twitter account, and not a FB account.
Exactly right. Facebook is still trying to be all things to all people. tsk tsk tsk.
one thing well?
maybe for small values of well.
Smart move, but still not a major threat to twitter. The lack of simplicity and SMS support will always separate Facebook from Twitter. I also agree with EV in that you they are different types of networks. Facebook you know and care about the people. Twitter you care about what the people are say and then get to know them.
Good point, I’d also add that the two sites have drastically different userbases so both will probably be fine.. A healthy Facebook probably keeps some of the “irrelevant noise” off of Twitter anyhow.
I think you mean the other way. Facebook for friends, Twitter for broadcast. Maybe not.
What about Facebook’s irrelevant Ad noise cluttering the screen? Garbagio.
True. Once the masses start adopting Twitter, I’ll be off to the next thing in no time. Pretty soon thus, I guess.
No interest in mediocrity.
The masses…oh god, you poor sob. The circlejerk that is twitter isn’t going to catch. deal with it, fanboiiiii
+1
Looking forward to it. Awesome.
I don’t understand how this is the demise of Twitter. The power behind twitter is not how it updates, but how you are able to access those updates. Anybody with a phone supporting SMS can use Twitter, while you need to have a smartphone or something to support Facebook updates. Somebody didn’t “facebook” a picture of the plane in the Hudson before the news media. While the two merge in competition for social networking, there are distinct operational models of how they work and neither will die.
Facebook does have ways to update status, and get new messages via SMS for low-end cell phones as well.
Frankly, I don’t see Twitter giving two bits. The whole concept of Twitter is simple and uncomplicated. Social networks like Facebook, Hi5 and PerfSpot are endless dimensions of complexity compared to Twitter. I think that the personality types that are attracted to these platforms individually are very different from each other. On the other hand, you have the extremely hardcore few (you know who you are,) that will always have to have both. Twitter is not going away, sorry Facebook.
the fact is, celebrities, news sites, public figures and brands will move to facebook because having a page makes a lot more sense than having a username. when they’re gone and twitter hype is over, people will return to facebook
Sure, public figures, brands etc go on Facebook, but they’re largely ignored. I become a fan of things, join groups etc on Facebook all the time. I have never, ever gone back to any of those pages after that initial click to “Become a fan” or whatever. Whereas on Twitter, if I follow someone, I am seeing what they post on a daily basis. They get much more “face time” with me on Twitter than they ever could on Facebook.
Wasn’t that part of the point of this update? The pages will now become like 1-way friends, and their status updates will go right into your feed.
Isn’t that the point of this update? This new feature should enable people/brands we are a ‘fan’ of to be included in our stream of updates, sorta like a ‘broadcast’ tweet. The ‘groups’ feature is hopeless anyway, never does much for me. They could’ve done much more with Groups, as these are powerful sub-networks
I think its a good move for facebook but agree with some in saying, that doesn’t mean Twitter is dead. There are certainly more advantages to Twitter, for me as a business professional. Twitter is real time, user friendly, and simple. No matter how much simplifying Facebook does there is no way either site will knock each other out.
I use Twitter in a completely different way than I do Facebook, and will continue to do so. I also believe that Twitter may lose a little steam as a result of this, but will continue to flourish.
More and more moves like this have me convinced that Facebook wants to be THE internet and be the only site people use for anything and everything, and I don’t like that. It’s like they’re trying to be the Wal-Mart of the web, and it’s going to be at the expense of the local businesses (in this case Twitter, Flickr, etc). Facebook Connect is a perfect example of this. They want people to use ONLY Facebook so they can have access to information about everything you do. I’m sorry, but I don’t trust that…anybody that power-hungry, quite frankly, scares me.
As for Twitter, I find it great because you can get so much random information from so many people, but I don’t necessarily want them to see all the personal information (photos, etc) that I have, for now, on my FB account. Twitter is a strange phenomenon that took me a while to understand, but now that I’ve got it, I’m hooked…and Facebook will never take that away from me, regardless of how far their empire stretches.
keep in mind, Facebook tried to buy out Twitter for $500 million a while ago and failed.. i think you hit the nail on the head in terms of what Facebook’s set out to accomplish, and i’m actually pretty impressed to be honest – even if i don’t quite “trust” them..
it’s a business, they aren’t out to be friends with anyone.
Yeah, agree that they shouldn’t be out to make friends, and it is indeed impressive that they’ve accomplished what they have – they are innovators. I guess I just question their motives and what they’re planning on doing with all this information in the long run. I think we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks alone through their ToS debacle that THEY’RE not even quite sure yet, so they decided to “stake claim” on the information. Yes, I know they came out and said that wasn’t their intention, blah blah…but fact of the matter is, they printed it first THEN retracted it after the ensuing PR fiasco. There’s a shady tree here, I don’t care which side of the fence you’re on.
They shouldn’t be trying to make nice with the competition, but they SHOULD be trying to make nice with ME…the user, not flip flopping on issues and making me question their morals and motives…
world domination is what they’re aiming at. that’s what fb connect does – i don’t like that either, but it helps my apps grow faster
Once again Facebook demonstrates why they are ahead of the pack. I think that most of this is going to be well received. I don’t see how this is going to affect twitter in anyway though…
ahead of the pack in mediocrity, yes. Twitter will have the same fate, unfortunately. It’s always the same: Once Joe Average, companies and brands start adopting it, it’s over. Sadly.
Only sites and tools blessed by his holiness, The Cail work, till others adopt them.
FAIL.
i was a facebook fan..now i am a twitter fan..and i can say, i am at this page..cz, i use twitter..n via twitter…not facebook..i dont think, facebook could ever take me to this page.
But how does one make money on Facebook or Twitter? Please don’t tell me advertising. Most people will abandon these sites if they made it fee based. Useful services but not enough to drive a revenue stream.
Ha, you hit it on the head. Part of the strategy seems to be giving Mike Arrington shares so that he pushes your business constantly. The only hope there really is for any payout is acquisition.
All that needs to happen is for TC to keep mentioning Twitter constantly and for nutsacks like Cail to think they’re hot shit for ‘adopting’ Twitter, and hopefully cha-ching.
It’s the same bullshit strategy as any other useless acquisition (YouTube, anybody?)
The grass is always greener on the other side. Hence Facebook decided to redo there lawn so that their users don’t get jealous. I know several Facebook users who have never heard of Twitter, so this latest update will be seen as innovation to them. By the time they hear of Twitter they’ll think Facebook came up with the “stream”.
expect more short text modules to appear.
love twitter but they have no more monopoly on short message aggregation than aol or yahoo had on email. actually if original chat just survived with an innovative team we could have been sharing our text based brain farts years ago. as i like to say, the future is always late.
It is odd that I find out about Facebook changes via Twitter!
That’s hilarious, I didn’t even think about that. I was on Facebook, but found out about the changes FIRST on Twitter.
Exactly! Twitter isn’t dead, the imitator will be. Twitter’s real strength is NOT as a social network, it’s as a live feed for the world – a news portal, a social network, a gossip site etc. Anyone who recently followed cycling’s Tour of California (via atoc) saw what effect Twitter’s live search feed could have on something like sport or news (one effect is that governments cannot move quickly enough to suppress and control the truth in news. Facebook can’t do any of this, and frankly Facebook is just going to be the latest myspace, friends reunited etc. The real future of the web is live search – and although they’re slow to realise is, the reality is that twitter is essentially a live ‘human’ search network. The future. bye bye facebook
Is this live now? The feeds don’t seem all that “real time” yet.
Gotta agree with many others here, twitter is simple and focused. Another hurdle – I love tweetdeck and tweetie, and there’s nothing comparable for facebook. there could be a “bookdeck” or something in the future, but i’m not sure there’d be any benefit to those who switched over, especially if your feeds are synced already.
it’s not likely that fb will replace twitter. on facebook you can’t easily “follow” personal profiles you are interested in. you need to establish some degree of trust to connect to that person. presumably using twitter is also faster because the homepage size is small.
I’m extremely curious how exactly this will actually work. From what I’m reading, Facebook’s fan pages will now be more public with updates going to your wall instead of a totally different entity. If this is the case, this could be huge. But the main aspect keeping Twitter alive and strong is its simplicity. How simple will Facebook get? When I have Facebook open, I, personally, use the Live Updates tab instead of the main feed. The biggest disadvantage to that is seeing the crapplications posting to the feed. If you can filter out all of the crapps and just view status messages and other main tools in real time then, yes, it could be very useful. Another thing to look at is how Facebook implement these new features with their mobile applications such as Blackberry and iPhone. I think they would have to be totally revamped. Especially the iPhone app. And how open will their API be for 3rd party developers to develop apps for the feed interaction? We’ll see. This is promising but not a Twitter killer….yet.
facebook has some 40000 apps and an open api for years now. the birds won’t tweet no more, that’s damn sure
Is there room for more than one network to maintain our thoughts?
here goes facebook users privacy concerns … since there will be none …
sad for facebook users but they don’t pay any money anyways. So screw them as much as possible.
Facebook already did what Twitter did, and it did it better.
My friends were already on Facebook and updating their statuses before Twitter. Plus, Facebook newsfeed is essentially Twitter, except richer.
just to be chronologically correct, twitter is essentially facebook newsfeed, just poorer
I’d say that’s chronological, but not quite correct. FriendFeed is essentially FB newsfeed. Twitter has a number of uses that neither of those can provide.
Except that you can’t follow people on Facebook.
Hopefully this elimintaes Twitter. All we need is one social network providing it serves all of our needs.
You, Sir, are the perfect victim.
I found out about this the same way OregonWmn did…through Twitter;)
I have been on Facebook since the time it was meant for college students only. I joined twitter last week.
AFAIK, Facebook allows you to connect with people you know, twitter allows you to connect with people you would like to know. That makes twitter attractive to me..
that’s what facebook is now doing with facebook pages – you won’t be friends with Barack, but you can be a fan
Who cares about being a fan? Pretty stupid and ineffective if you ask me…and you think Obama (or any other public figure for that matter) gives a hoot?
Zack, updates on the obama page will now be included in your home page. check out barack’s page, it’s live – http://www.face...rackobama?ref=s
i think this is gonna be huge
These are all things Facebook should have done awhile ago, but now finally did it in response to Twitter’s threat to their platform. Makes them retroactively smart, not genuises.
I just don’t understand why facebook think that flat-out emulating twitter is what they need to focus on.
Surely several hundreds of millions of facebook users don’t know or care about twitter, how it works or what or why real-time matters.
This just in…Facebook will now start allowing users to leave 141 character messages. Ha!
I use Twitter for twitter-related projects. I use Facebook for other projects. Both have a purpose. Both continue to get better. I like it. No one is getting voted off the island just yet.
I think imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Seems that Facebook’s model was getting old. People want to be talked to not sent a comment.
I’m not sure I like Pages looking like Profiles. I consider them separate. One is the person, the other is the business. Not having a differentiating look could be detrimental.
Facebook sucks…they copy everything, oh and who cares about Facebook’s pathetic loser stream. Well techcrunch cares.
isn’t facebook the one who introduced news feeds?
Let’s see… News Feeds were standardized with RFC 977 in February 1986, when Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook was 1 yr. old.
No, I don’t think so.
I’m pretty sure it’s MySpace that copies everything…
Zuck stole the facebook idea from his college buddies. Feed was first developed by multiply. Actually new facebook design is a rip off of Multiply design. Connect copes Open ID and this is a copy of Twitter. People don’t be stupid, Facebook is a marketing play, not a tech play. They market and PR the shit out of themselves so you guys can sin up..the technology and ideas they use are rip offs. From Zuck stealing ideas to start up to today, Facebook is a culture of theft.
somebody’s jealous.
i dont want to know whats on the minds of the vast majority of my facebook friends
Facebook can’t be twitter because of their privacy settings.
These are different offerings.
Discuss.
I hear they will be opening up the pages to be viewable by the non-logged-in public next year.
Facebook was bound to release this update whether they purchased twitter or not. It would’ve made more sense to everyone if Twitter were purchased.
Right? This would’ve happened either way. Instead of Twitter being apart of it, now it’s just on the opposite end.
Did you read the whole article? Didn’t it mention something along the lines of scrapping the privacy settings a bit?
“One of the biggest changes is that Facebook is getting rid of the distinction between private profiles and public pages.”
If they are trying to create more revenue they should not have changed the Pages. Brands were using the pages to showcase some of their products, promotions, etc… Now, it’s just a big wall. The other content is all on tabs that nobody will every click.
Why would these brands now want to spend money to advertise on Facebook if they will drive users to a page that is just like any other page, nothing special going on, no real branding???
70MM+ monthly uniques vs. 6MM would be the tail wagging the dog
At this point if Facebook charged users $10 per year they would get it. It’s all about the convergence of utility with capabilities. The social graph amplifies all that. Now that all your friends and family are on Facebook. Now that you know employers will look you up there… why would you not be there?
*whew* good thing i haven’t signed up for twitter haha