Earlier today Facebook turned on a feature to let users receive text updates from public profiles, the same way that Twitter users can receive mobile updates from specified profiles. It’s a small change but for brands it adds a lot of potential. Mobile broadcasting is a huge feature for companies that are looking to reach out to fans directly.
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Over the weekend there were a lot of discussions regarding the new Sign in with Twitter service, which was revealed last Friday. Ultimately it’s extremely similar to the OAuth authorization process that developers have been using for the past month or so. There are also a number of buttons to let users log in with Twitter in a way that’s somewhat similar to Facebook Connect. The primary difference? Twitter uses open standards, not a proprietary model as Facebook has built.
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Facebook continues to be growing at the rate of around 5 million users a week according to the latest numbers but Twitter, the latest Silicon Valley darling, is posting some impressive growth figures of its own. The most recent data provided by Google Trends shows that Twitter has reached a search volume in just over a year and a quarter, that it took Facebook 2 and a half years to accomplish.
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Yesterday I began doing some research to determine if there was a shift taking place among top Twitter users and Facebook users given the new Facebook design. I was trying to determine the most effective barometer of user influence across both sites and the only thing I could come up with was a comparison of the top users on each site. After a couple hours I had broken down the top 50 Twitter users and top 50 Facebook public profiles to determine how the two sites stack up against each other.
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Today Tweetdeck will officially announce integration via Facebook Connect, bringing streaming Facebook status updates directly to your desktop. Just last week I suggested that this will soon become a reality. Little did I know how quickly this would actually take place. One of the largest hurdles to developing streaming status services in the past was a delay in response time to status.get API calls.
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If you’ve been following Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter feed over the past few days you probably noticed that he was updating his status from TweetDeck. So why on earth would Mark Zuckerberg use a tool which relies on a competing platform (Twitter)? If you don’t think it’s a big deal, imagine if Mark Zuckerberg decided to set up a MySpace page to start promoting himself in order to reach a different audience. Do you think he would do that? I doubt it.
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Following yesterday’s news that Mark Zuckerberg had joined Twitter, Mark began following hundreds of followers this afternoon. In just over a day, Mark attracted over 5,000 followers on Twitter, more than have become fans of him on Facebook. So why would Mark suddenly become so active on the site? Eric Eldon speculates that one reason may be that they’ve revisited the negotiating table with Twitter and have successfully agreed upon a rational valuation.

A counter argument to this speculative notion is that Mark is trying out what it’s like to use a completely open communication channel as Facebook will soon become just as open. As Eric Eldon also notes, David Recordon recently suggested that the site will soon be much more open and Mark Zuckerberg decided to confirm that via a public Tweet, “@daveman692 You’re not crazy :)”.
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Liz Gannes wrote an incredible piece today on the NewTeeVee blog discussing the “Changing Nature of Virality”. She hit the nail on the head in what is an evolving model of sharing on the web. For the past couple years, sites like Digg and Delicious have made it possible to drive a substantial amount of traffic to sites after articles reach the homepage.

The only problem with the existing model is that it can be gamed (take a look at this Los Angeles Times article for more). Contrast that with Facebook in which quality information naturally spreads throughout the social graph. Over the past month I’ve received at least 150,000 visitors from Facebook alone and none of that traffic was under my control. All I did was write an article that a large number of Facebook users were interested in.
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The web is abuzz about Spencer Ante’s article yesterday in which Peter Thiel confirmed that yes, Facebook tried to acquire Twitter. The buzz is not surprising considering that the two companies have been receiving an immense amount of attention from the press over the past few weeks as both continue to post amazing growth statistics.

What was most intriguing about the article was the two statements that “Facebook and Twitter haven’t completely walked away from one another” and that “The two companies continue to talk”. Last week I suggested that Facebook must do something about the Twitter threat. One of those things is to acquire the company and the other is to open up even more.
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Over the past two days I slowed down my blog volume to do something I hadn’t done in a while: program an application for Twitter. My programming knowledge often becomes more of a hinderance than a benefit. The reason is that I come up with ideas so often that I occasionally start to program the idea without thinking it through. Being an idea person is good if you can’t program but when you can program it can become a burden pretty quickly.

I’m not a software engineer but I know enough to be dangerous. This isn’t about me programming though. It’s about the gut reaction that took place two days ago. The great idea that I had at 2 AM was about a Twitter application, not a Facebook app. Yes, I have a few big ideas about Facebook applications as well but I’ve been increasingly considering developing apps for Twitter.
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