Facebook
recently announced a few changes to their status update system that closely
replicate Twitter’s
offering:

• Your friends’ three most recent updates on the
  home
  page
• A
  brand
  new page to see all your friends’ updates at once
• An RSS feed to put your friends’ updates in your reader of choice
• The ability to subscribe to a friend’s updates via
  SMS
• The ability to easily update status from your phone by
  sending
  an SMS to Facebook starting with the “@” character

Among my non-Twitter converted friends, the toughest group to convert after
Luddites is Facebook users. Their basic response is, “Why would I need a service
like Twitter do do what I already do with Facebook?” That together with, “all of
my friends are on Facebook, so what do I need Twitter for?” are the two most
common push backs.



When I look at Twitter, I see a crowd who was out of college before Facebook
came along. They see Twitter as a cool service, but only because they weren’t
already locked into Facebook through years of network building.



Considering that Facebook offers even more Twitter-like functionality in the
form of SMS subscriptions and status updates, their case for standardizing on
Facebook appears to be even stronger.

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