Facebook Wants To Be Twitter, Part II
This evening Facebook began testing what appears to be their version of Twitter’s retweet feature: “via”. On any article shared by your friend, you can click on “Share” and when you post the article to your profile, Facebook will now automatically say who the article came from. While the “via” content only currently works on shared articles, I’d assume that this feature would be extended to other stream stories if initial user testing proves successful. We’ve written extensively about the Twitterfication of Facebook, and this appears to be one more step in that process.
I haven’t had a chance to look at this closely, but it lines up with what I wrote a few months back (see Facebook Wants To Be Twitter):
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.
Notice that this was an implementation of Retweet. Looks he knocked off the New RT, not Classic.
