Is Facebook the next Twitter? No, but a Platform!
The bloggerati are slowly becoming the twitterati and if you ask the right people love for Twitter is all around you. For those of us who use Twitter daily, or like me have secured themselves a one letter Twitter nick (o), we are seeing that it becomes a lot more of our social network than a emm… social network.
I actually still believe things like Xing or LinkedIn should focus on syncing my addressbook, instead of life streams and all else. And the power of Twitter is that there are no conversations of a meaningful extent. And now the blogosphere is alight with recent news.
First of all Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation, allowing your Facebook Login to be used on other sites, which RWW thinks is wonderful news. I tend to agree and think it is a good first step in the right direction. It is still problematic that my content is locked in in Facebook. I use my mails on my own personal domain for the same reason. Still, Facebook is good and good is getting better.
The Facebook posted news of a new API to allow access to among others status items … the twitter like stuff within Facebook. So Loic thinks they now compete directly with Twitter and AllFacebook already says goodbye to Twitter. TheNextWeb thinks it is huge, and RWW has a nice little summary and more numbers and has one very good point.
Facebook is tearing down the wall. It is not trying to become the next Twitter, but it is just giving people what they feel their need to more intimately connect and are now slowly opening up the right APIs. This API is by now very rich, allowing applications to be written the upload status messages, videos, fotos, access status messages of friends, and so on. Slowly but surely Facebook is really moving where you can build a website with Facebook as a platform. If I would now want to do a focused little community I could move my video and photo storage to Facebook, do the messaging and all else.
A few good points on why this will not kill twitter can be found here on Techcrunch. In all simpleness, Twitter has a different focus. It’s really a system to send short messages and not a social network. Facebook is the other way around. Above that, Twitter is messages only and Facebook will tell me everything about my friends.
As sad as this makes me, it might be that this move allows Facebook to take the Twitter idea mainstream a lot faster than Twitter can. Twitter now has lots of apps around it and Facebook has those apps within Facebook. The problem is who wins and this is where I hope that things will slowly start to change.
There shouldn’t be the need for anyone to win damn it! I want to send all kinds of messages to all my friends. No matter where they are registered. We are still a bit of time away from this but Facebook opening up more and more and Twitter being fully stable and growing fast, the idea of openness is slowly gaining traction.
Next up I will touch on my personal social store thingie again, in which I am now using Noserub to store and index all my social life at thylmann.net.