Facebook Adds Twitter Like Functionality

Facebook has announced several changes to their site, via a web re-design, in what we believe is an attempt to steal market share from Twitter.

Facebook Pages are now operating in the way of a user Profile, meaning they may be updated more often by owners of the Profiles thus providing more traffic by readers. The profiles also include status updates or short messages similar to tweets on twitter. These status updates will allow users to communicate directly to the community of anyone who wishes to receive their communications.

The new Facebook Homepage will allow you to see what's shared by you and your friends and allows more "live" interactions with them. You also now have much more control, you can decide you no longer want to get updates from your old friend from high school who you rarely talk to, or you can filter the stream to only see updates about your family members. If you want, you can read what President Obama is saying on the same page as your best friend. You can find out what it is your mother, your high school classmate or President Obama are doing, thinking and sharing right now just by logging into Facebook.

The social networking site also removed the limitation on the number of friends that you may have, which was previously set to 5,000.

You can view a tour of the new homepage at Facebook.com.

These are very smart moves by Facebook, but one has to wonder if they are too late to obtain the market share from Twitter? Has Twitter grown to large and are users finally "at home" with them? Perhaps the two social networking sites are still two totally different beasts.

Facebook, formerly Thefacebook, is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide. Facebook recently surpassed Myspace in amount of visitors, making Facebook the number 1 social network, followed by Myspace and Twitter. The California based company has over 700 employee's and brought in an estimated $300 million last year from ad revenue.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. The California based company has only 34 employees running the company. You can Follow Tech Fragments to get all of our latest news and tips.