Facebook Wants To Be Twitter

Marshall KirkPatrick www.readwriteweb.com

Facebook wants you to make the status messages you post visible to the entire internet.

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A substantial backlash has already begun in comments on the Facebook blog post about the announcement. Previous moves by the company, like the introduction of the news feed, have seen user resistance as well - but this move cuts against the fundamental proposition of Facebook: that your status updates are only visible to those you opt-in to exposing them to. You’ll now have to opt-out of being public and opt-in to communicating only with people you’ve given permission to see your content.

Will users go for it? If Facebook becomes a lot more like Twitter, will users stick around? The network of friends you’ve created on Facebook can’t be taken anywhere else - access to those people off-site is limited due to “privacy concerns.”

People are spiraling around the real issue here. All the purportedly Machiavellian reasons for Facebook to flipflop on its privacy orientation — to get more page views, or to make activities more visible — miss the real driver. Zuckerberg is obsessed with Twitter. He tried to acquire it once, was spurned, and now he is morphing Facebook into Twitter, which is more or less what he had hoped to do through acquisition.

So, once the pain has abated from the most recent yank in the chain between Zuckerberg’s hand and the user’s neck we will have traveled one giant step closer to a open, streaming son of Facebook.

Remember that Zuckerberg didn’t dream up the design of the original Facebook: he stole the whole thing while working with the Brothers Winklevoss and others on ConnectU (and settled for $65M). His scheme with Twitter was to buy what he sees as the superior model to Facebook Classic. That acquisition failed, so he has acquired Friendfeed’s brain trust, and they are busy rewiring the DNA of the platform.

Don’t get me wrong: he may become a very serious challenge to Twitter. He has serious bank. I think the Twitter guys should do that IPO and hire an additional 100 people to keep innovating faster than he can keep up. And not by rejiggering things like retweet — we need some more groundbreaking advances.