Facebook Twitter Envy? Changes Today...

[ChristineG]

"Facebook today announced several (and somewhat big) changes to their homepage/newsfeed, as well as the removal of most distinctions between public pages and profiles. These changes are an attempt to take on Twitter, which Facebook failed to acquire late last year."

From Gigaom: With Twitter Envy, Facebook Adds (Near) Real-time Web Capabilities

Interesting...thoughts? I still think Twitter and Facebook are 2 different animals entirely...

[lisawood]

Interesting that FB has moved in this direction. I'm not surprised that there is a desire to go with more "real time" updates, but it seems that FB has had some hiccups lately and their objectives seem a bit disjointed.

Of course it's good to remember that in Twitter's early days, there were definitely growing pains. The "fail whale" doesn't show up nearly as often anymore. Maybe FB is going through a similar process, trying to define its place in the online community.

[menexis]

I heard some rumors that FB is about to buyout twitter for like 120M

[imsmall]

At the end of the day FB will still be a social networking site and not a microblogging service …

[Wayne Liew]

Originally Posted by menexis

I heard some rumors that FB is about to buyout twitter for like 120M

Yes, they did try and fail. This happens before the layout changes.

I think they are not going up against Twitter in any way. The community on Twitter and the one on Facebook is totally different. Web users are now favoring real time web and I guess this is the major reason why they make the changes.