Facebook’s Upcoming Changes: Last Days for Twitter?
Today Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, posted on the company’s blog, the upcoming changes to Facebook. At first glance, the changes seem to be targeted directly at obtaining the steam Twitter has collected over the past year. High profile user’s who have fan pages, will now be more open to the public.
From the blog: “Starting today, we are announcing new profiles for public figures and organizations. Once called Pages, these new profiles will now begin looking and functioning just like user profiles. Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed.”
This is a huge step for Facebook. It almost seems like Facebook will become an enhanced Twitter. But will it derail Twitter? Twitter has become popular because of its simplicity and 3rd party community. The effect of these changes to Facebook will be determined on how open their API will be. I, for one, do not want to open a browser everytime I want to see what everyone is up to. In fact, I rarely open up the Twitter home page. I use Twhirl for my desktop app and Tweetie on my iPhone. So how lenient is Facebook willing to be with their API? Only time will tell.
While writing this, a thought hit me. Can Facebook become your all-in-one portal for browsing the web? Can it be a one-stop shop for browsing news feeds and keeping up with your friends? I think it could be and this is where Facebook will grow. Allowing businesses to publish their RSS feeds in their Facebook feeds will be huge for, not only Facebook, but also the businesses. I rarely open up a browser to read a news story anymore unless the RSS feed is truncated *cough cough* Engadget/TUAW *cough*. Instead I use NetNewsWire to keep up with everything happening around the world.
So will Facebook be the Walmart of the internet? I think it can and will be. There’s nothing wrong with that. People will be mad, blogs will be upset that their visitor numbers will decrease but who’s fault is it that YOU didn’t think of this? Blogs and other news entities can make up for this by putting subtle ads in their feeds like some sites already do.
So how will you use the new Facebook?
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