A lot of people on Twitter are passing around the link to Jesse Newhart’s (justified) little rant about how Facebook is trying to be Twitter. I know this because I looked it up on Tweetmeme – goodbye Techmeme?
I think everyone’s noticed recently that Facebook, in it’s recent home page redesign, is starting to look a lot like Twitter (or more accurately, like FriendFeed).
The interesting thing, though, is that when I first joined Twitter in 2007 I kept calling it “Facebook Status Updates Plus,” because that’s what the functionality is. So in a way, Facebook is really just trying to catch up to its own potential.
But I think the real problem is that Facebook, and probably all the other social networks, will ultimately follow AOL into walled-garden obscurity. Facebook is an exoskeleton, and they know it.
They’re so damn worried about Twitter not because they want to be the hot new thing, but because they can’t let open, platform-level technologies siphon user activity out of their black hole. Once that happens, they lose their leverage and their value as a walled garden.
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