“Anyone want to grab a bite in a few minutes?”
Short, sweet, and purposeful—this is how Facebook envisions its users utilizing status updates on its site with the latest update to the Facebook Events application. Announced on the Facebook blog yesterday, this new update hopes to make sharing an event with family and friends as instant and easy as it is now to share a link or video.
Clicking the “Events” icon—in the same way that users currently select “Link” or “Video”—opens up an interface for inputting the title, location, and time of the event you wish to create. After publishing the event to your and your friends’ news feeds, you can invite friends, limit the event to certain people, or add various other specifications to the event.
This is the second piece of news from the Facebook blog in two weeks that can be interpreted as the social networking giant planting itself firmly in Twitter’s market space. The first came on June 24 when Facebook announced the launch of the Facebook Live Stream Box, a tool that allows users to comment in a real-time, Twitter-like conversation alongside a live stream of timely events like sports games or political meetings.
While Facebook continues to make repeatedly aggressive moves into multifarious arenas—real-time chat, event planning, celebrity networking—I can’t help but wonder what Twitter’s long-term plans are. Each of Facebook’s latest updates signal a migration toward a focus on answering the question, “What are you doing?” as succinctly and precisely as possible.
I am going to lunch right now. I am watching Monday Night Football. I’m following President Obama’s discussion on the future of health care.
While Twitter remains essentially software for status updates, Facebook is evolving quickly into an extremely useful and, for some, completely necessary online suite. Whether Twitter will or wants to respond to this fact, we have yet to see.
(image sources: JESS3 Blog & Facebook Blog)
