Infinite Path

Facebook, the leading social networking site, has bought FriendFeed: another social networking site which they hope will further secure their dominant position over Twitter.

The success of Twitter has led to many similar online companies trying to copy their model. Facebook changed the look of their site and adapted the user experience so that people can now view status updates from friends in a simplified format. This is very similar to what Twitter offers and is clearly popular as proven by the fact that the vast user-base did not revolt against the changes.

Twitter has managed to engage with a huge number of people and is used for many reasons including business, marketing, social communication and search. Facebook is rather more social-orientated and, more importantly, it would seem that it is more popular with young people than Twitter.

Both Twitter and Facebook have very sketchy business models. There is potential in both, but it would seem that Twitter has more obvious ways of generating revenue, through it being a marketing channel for businesses, offering verified accounts for high-profile users and obviously ads on its pages. Facebook has those opportunities in the marketing and ads sector but doesn’t seem to have capitalised in a major way on anything yet.

The Twitter concept is incredible in its simplicity and popularity. It doesn’t have as many users as Facebook and it’s not as big an operation but it is rapidly growing and the scope for opportunities is becoming ever clearer.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook can capitalise with its latest purchase and really create a strong proposition to compete with Twitter.