How much more similar can Facebook and Twitter get before someone, somewhere wakes up one morning and asks why we even need two services offering the same set of features? Right now they are still different and unique, but Facebook is edging toward copying Twitter completely on a daily basis. First came the real-time status updates feed, and now comes Twitter-style @ friend tags. What’s left?

At one point a couple of years ago, MySpace sat as the dominant social network. Then a young pretender called Facebook entered the fray and took its crown. Then an even newer, younger, and fresher-faced contender called Twitter entered stage left. And Facebook realized it had to adapt and evolve in order to stay on top – by stealing all of Twitter’s ideas.

Maybe stealing is the wrong word, with copying being a more fitting description. Last year saw Facebook try to buy Twitter and fail miserably. So instead, it bought FriendFeed and set about making Facebook as near a clone to Twitter as you can get without crossing the line of illegality.

In March of this year Facebook introduced a redesign which made the homepage update in real-time. This coincided with a change to the status update from asking “What are you doing right now?” to the more open-ended and conversational, “What’s on your mind?” Facebook became Twitter-Lite in all but name.

Now, as announced in a post on the Facebook Blog, Facebook is introducing the option to tag friends with the simple use of the @ symbol. What a brilliant idea, and one I’ve never seen used on any other social network. I wonder how they came up with it?

Facebook has long given its users the chance to tag friends in photos, videos, or notes. But the option will now be available in status updates as well, with the use of @ prompting a dropdown menu containing a list of your contacts. The use of the @ symbol in tagging friends has become synonymous with Twitter, so Facebook’s integration of it is cheeky to say the least.

Having said that, it should make for a nice addition to the site, except maybe for people with thousands of friends who could find themselves spending hours a day untagging their names from people’s updates. Won’t that be fun.

The question now is what’s left for Facebook to copy from Twitter? I can only think of a 140-character limit on updates and daily downtime. Neither of which would improve the site.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 11:10 pm under Amusing, Internet, Legal, Opinion, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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