Will Facebook Lite take down Twitter?
Mashable broke the news yesterday that Facebook is creating Facebook Lite. What is Facebook Lite? Well I’m glad you asked. According to their article
It is a completely stripped-down version of the Facebook platform. From what we can tell, it is almost like a Twitter (Twitter) stream: you can see your most recent status updates and the updates of your friends. There is a left-hand navigation with four main categories: Wall, Info, Friends, and Photos & Videos. It does little more than that.
He’s a quick screenshot of the future service
As you can see, it looks similar to the twitter interface. The one major difference in the layout is that the right panel in Twitter is moved to the left panel in Facebook Lite. Your profile picture and links remain on the left side of the News Feed as Facebook has always looked.
The next feature that goes above and beyond Twitter will be responding to status updates. It’s much harder to follow a conversation in Twitter due to the @username replies that are not easily connected within a conversation. The screenshot shows Facebook’s normal function of displaying comments on a status update and subsequent replies directly below the original update. This makes it much easier to follow a conversation.
Back to the original question, will Facebook Lite take down Twitter? Not anytime soon. Unless there is still more to be released about Facebook Lite, they each still have a niche market. Twitter is less personal in a good way, and Twitter makes it easier to follow and gather information I care about. It does not require me to “friend” someone to follow their status. There is a perceived and real stronger connection between most people on Facebook in comparison to Twitter. For example, if I do a search on Twitter to find information on a particular topic or scan the public opinion, and I find a person with many relevant and valuable posts, I don’t think twice about “following” that person. However, with Facebook, I am more hesitant to “friend” someone. Yes, there are privacy settings that could be changed to only show as much information about me as I share on Twitter, but that becomes a hassle with each new “friend”. I’m sure Facebook understands the concerns around this issue and will be addressing it. There will undoubtedly be revolt on Facebook as we have learned in the past with Facebook’s many changes, but as we have also learned, they emerge stronger.
Let the microblogging war begin.
