Having seen the incredible rise of Twitter as one of the most popular social networking sites on the Web, Facebook has over the past couple months been aggressively implementing, to limited groups of users, a range of updates that mimic the functionality of the Twitter’s incredibly basic site.
Facebook continues its trot towards becoming very much like the public and global community Twitter with the removal of the ability to search for friends by regional network, a change first spotted by All Facebook last night. Though Facebook announced over a month ago that changes of this kind would be taking place, the updates, like this latest one, are still affecting the site day-to-day.
The real question is whether Facebook is crippling itself by trying so hard to be just like Twitter.
In one of the many executive documents famously leaked by the hacker who acquired them a few weeks ago, Twitter asks the painful question, “How could Facebook kill us?” And topping the list of answers are the phrases “Real-time Search” and “Opt-in to make status public.”
Theoretically, all Facebook has to do is make status updates public and add an engine to search for these updates in real-time. That is Twitter’s entire service right there and Facebook is already working on adding these services. But they might be going further, in a bad way.
The same executive Twitter document does not go on to say Facebook should eliminate their regional communities.
Twitter’s executives didn’t think Facebook could kill their service by becoming their service. That makes no sense. Rather, they feared that if it chose to add the full capabilities of Twitter to its already vast arsenal of services, Facebook could vastly improve what it already does best by making its community more Twitter-like.
As a concrete example, consider the power of regional networks. While it’s interesting to see what the whole world thinks of a trending topic, imagine the usefulness of comparing those results with tweets on the same topic by region. Facebook had an entire platform built with hundreds of million users plugged in and regional networks assigned to each. When they finally make the transition to a site with fully implemented public statuses and real-time search, they could have (with the addition of a few lines of code) allowed users to search by region.
And this is just one piece of useful information that Facebook used to store from its users.
Facebook has an excellent platform with bountiful loads of information about each of its users. Sending any of that information to the recycle bin is just a mistake, plain and simple.
(image sources: JESS3 Blog & Mashable)
