Facebook is on the march, though I have no clue about the destination. A few days back, I read about the ‘Search Inbox’ feature getting added, that’s after the overall search was revamped and the rumours of the “Everyone Button“. With photo sharing, a revamped mail box, status updates, videos, games, I guess I’ll have to correct the earlier statement and say that the ‘walled garden’ has offered enough evidence that it is making itself *the* destination.
I remembered an article I read a couple of weeks back on how its this merging of activities on facebook that has given it a growth of 8.54% growth in the last month, as compared to Twitter’s sudden fall to a relatively dismal 1.47% growth rate. As Shefaly pointed out the last time I’d compared the two services, there’d still be an audience that consider the Twitter protocol more useful in spite of Facebook’s ‘charms’. A general comparison of the user figures would show that Facebook has the mass. Whether the Twitter audience is a good enough number, time will tell.
The other interesting article I read was about the social network identity crisis. For one, this is not about us, the users, but the networks themselves. I’d written sometime back about LinkedIn’s attempts to be like Facebook, which thankfully didn’t develop much. This article compares LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and their overlap. Friendfeed is another unique character in the mix, and serves well as a great aggegator, though it does appear geeky as far as the average user of Facebook goes. Like I’ve said before, Friendfeed thinks up all the neat stuff, and Facebook makes them popular to the masses. As for LinkedIn, their ‘official’ networking positioning keeps them at a safe distance now.
But yes, the battle, in different manifestations for several years now- as mailboxes, portals and so on, has been for the spot of destination site, or rather the starting point of the user experience on the web, the first site a user opens on his browser, the base. And that’s the reason i feel that the recent spate of Facebook’s initiatives, while they seem to be aimed at replicating the utility of Twitter, are actually targeted against Google, and specifically, Wave. The approach of both are actually from two opposite directions – Google, from Mail and Talk to the spectacular collaborating, sharing and weaving features of Wave, and Facebook from social networking to newsfeed, to chat and mailboxes. Wave is Open Source, Facebook is opening the stream to developers. It will be interesting to see whether there can only be one/couple/all survivor/s from Wave, Facebook and the simple appeal of Twitter.
until next time, Wavebook 🙂
Update: Excellent post on Facebook vs Google, (click it, dammit :p) and here too, and why Facebook has a chance.