I don’t remember where I saw recent changes to Facebook described as desperate attempts to keep up with Twitter. Anyway, here’s a move which might fit in the same category:
'Tag a friend': Facebook picks up Twitter's @username syntax
Type @ into status updates, and you can include friends’ names, creating updates which are echoed onto their walls. Okay. But why adopt the be-more-like-Twitter approach? Why would Facebook, the do-everything Swiss Army chainsaw of social media, think that adding another level of complexity makes it more like Twitter, with its simplicity and one-dimensionality? (Know I don’t mean that as a negative.) Perhaps those coming late to social media see Facebook and Twitter as mutually exclusive, and find Facebook’s current focus on friends’ information streams, rather than interpersonal communication, as negative. But given the number of people who’ve integrated the two services, how prevalent is that view?
It might be that Facebook is correcting for the unintended consequences of diversifying its interface. Once it became possible to “like” or comment on nearly every Facebook utterance, wall-to-wall communication, long a Facebook standby, took a hit as wall posts (and other utterances) garnered replies by comment, not by paired wall-to-wall posts. Last week this was apparent to me twice: (1) I asked someone for context on an update; once I viewed it his whole stream of updates (via Twitter), the post made perfect sense. However, viewed single-page (via RSS), I missed the whole story. (2) I wrote on someone else’s wall, and they replied as a comment on that post–not on my wall, as in the old days.
I like the comment-on-everything model, and given that I’m not a heavy mobile phone user, Facebook-centric updates make more sense for me than Twitter-centric. But my guess is that’s not the norm. I don’t know enough about the demographics to know if Twitter is “stealing” communication once done via Facebook, but adoption of the @ syntax by Facebook seems a pretty clear attempt to keep up.