Facebook is waking up to the Twitter threat. Yes it’s a threat and the two are going to clash. Having proved it is no flash in the pan, Twitter is going to eat into the social networking site's traffic and Facebook is doing something about it.Reports on a presentation that took place yesterday are saying that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about making the site more "real time". Does that sound familiar? Sure it does, basically Zukerberg (who is apparently obsessed with Twitter) wants his own version on Facebook.Facebook is going to revamp its status update, which was kind of fun and really kept us all quite busy until Twitter came along and then it kept us much less busy, which must be of a concern to Facebook.Facebook wants its users to reengage with its central update feature to ward off the seemingly unstoppable march of Twitter.It is a case of if you can't buy them then at least try to beat them. Yesterday, I blogged about how Twitter investor Todd Chaffee sees real time search as the future of Twitter. He is sure this is where it is going to make its money. As this starts to happen, the threat level of Facebook rises significantly.The real-time web appears to be the new future. The next step in 2.0. Facebook's play to get on board the real-time web wagon (love the sound of the web wagon) will see it change the status prompt from "What are you doing right now?" to "What’s on your mind?".Facebook also said that it is lifting the limit on friends. Like Twitter those really popular types (don't know any personally) and celebs can reach far beyond the present 5,000 limit and aim for the kinds of numbers achieved by the likes of Twitter god Stephen Fry who currently has a staggering 262,694 followers and rising.It seems that all of this, as well as changes to Facebook pages, is designed to keep people on Facebook and in particular brands that are successfully turning to Twitter.Will the Twitterization of Facebook work or is it too little too late? There are some out there saying it is too late and that the Facebook audience doesn't really get it.On the plus side, unlike other Twitter rivals out there Facebook does have a very large audience to engage with. It also has on its side that we are at the early days of the real-time web giving it a window of opportunity to stake its claim and win its audience over.At the moment Twitter seems to be dominated by social media commentators, digital workers, journalists and, oh yeah, celebrities, but as every day passes it is broadening its base as people other than early adopters wake up to the joys of the real-time web.I think it has a very good shot at making it work. Very much like the explosion of social media with MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and LinkedIn, there is room for more than one player when it comes to the real time web.
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Interesting post on Techcrunch asking if Twitter is becoming more like MySpace, which wants to be more
Having sifted the rumour mill this morning, I'm not sure if there are any gold nuggets there. It
Gordon Macmillan
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