Comments on: Facebook ‘status’ changes no threat to Twitter

By: Tamlyn

Tamlyn — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:46:41 +0000

Good post, Phil. I fail see how anyone could see this as a threat to twitter. Status updates are inherently limited by their format while on the other hand Twitter represents a completely new way of communicating, one in which people choose who to listen to rather than who to talk to.

By: philsheard

philsheard — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:01:51 +0000

Drew – agree that a wider API makes it possible for people to develop new services. We might see Facebook evolve a lot from this, and I think it needs to in order to remain the most popular.

I’m coming at it from a ‘spamming your friends’ angle – the stream of updates if my friends began updating their status every 20 minutes would make the current implementation of the ‘Newsfeed’ unworkable; you’d either have far too much info on there, or would miss valuable info because Facebook was applying a filter to it.

We’ve seen the site adapt to cope with the spam updates coming from the flood of Applications, so let’s look forwards to how this makes the site adapt further

By: Jeff Harmon

Jeff Harmon — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:01:02 +0000

I completely agree with you, unless I can call my friends by first name on the street, I will never befriend them on facebook. Twitter, on the other hand, I will follow anyone who has good content, just like a blog (hence microblog).

That being said, I wonder how long it will take a crowd of facebookers to turn facebook status updates into microblogs. It is facebook and the masses are there to give the incentive to me as long as I can separate the account from my personal facebook status updates.

For example: My brothers and I created a facebook app Status King. It is based completely around clever Status Updates and we are the first facebook app to turn facebook status updates into t-shirts. If Facebook gives us the ability to create a Status Update microblog for our app, I would use it in a heartbeat—just don’t make it so my friends have to see it without following.

If status updates become the microblogs and customer service and communication for apps, groups, fan pages, and even any website hooked to facebook connect, then I can see why people think this might just be Twitter’s death. Too bad “status update” does not have the wordplay of “twitter”—Twitter still has the most perfectly brandable name I have ever seen.

By: Drew

Drew — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:40:39 +0000

I’m wondering, not they’ve opened up the API, what cool stuff will start to happen to statuses though. Twitter’s had an open API for two years now and look at stuff like Tweetdeck, Summize (which Twitter acquired) and Twitterberry.