Twitter on Facebook? Almost Real Time Web Capabilities

No, not quite, Facebook has not bought Twitter, I know they tried and failed last year, but with their enormous numbers, it was just a matter of time before they surrendered to real-rime web capabilities - or almost real time.

More than 5000 Friends on Facebook

I noticed yesterday when I went to Facebook that they were announcing the changes to Profile pages and feeds, so I browsed around a bit and found a few posts with interesting info.

Yay for those with Messiah complexes! Like Twitter, you can now have more than 5000 friends on Facebook. With Pages being removed and everybody having Profiles it is going to be interesting - and hard work from an SEO perspective promoting a business or celebrity - but hey challenges are cool and we just adjust and move on.

Facebook is also speeding up the updates that populate the news feeds on everyone’s personal page.

Twitter Envy

Gigaom describes it as Twitter envy: "For starters, Facebook announced changes to its home page that would allow streaming of “posts from your friends in real-time.” Facebook also changed the status prompt from “What are you doing right now?” to “What’s on your mind?” — a blatant attempt to prompt a more real-time interaction, and bringing it one step further than Twitter’s “What are you doing?”

FaceBook Conference Marc Zuckerberg Explains

Eric Schonfeld blogged live for Tech Crunch yesterday from the Facebook conference:

Marc Zuckerberg explains: "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). People asking for 5,000 friends, don’t necessarily want to connect with 5,000 people, they want to let 5,000 people connect with them. Pages are now similar to user profiles, but profiles are similar to pages in that people can have 1 sided connections.

We’re seeing an interesting trend that a lot of people are open to sharing information to specific people. A big part of what we’re doing is sharing information in a safe way."