Facebook’s Next Step In Crushing Twitter

August 11th 2009

ADOTAS — Though the growing social network has a friend-only wall and the microblogging network is open to everyone, it still looks like at least one of them believes it is competing for a similar audience.

Facebook has started to roll out a new ‘everyone’ search feature that makes it possible to see all public results from Facebook users (the Everyone filter), or just results from your friends. And today, Facebook announced that it will buy FriendFeed, which has a treasure-trove of ex-Google engineers. Terms were not disclosed.

FriendFeed lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs. It’s similar, though not as popular as Twitter. Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang told Reuters that Facebook’s big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise.

“These guys now how to build scalable, social applications,” Owyang told Reuters.

Meanwhile, Twitter is getting no love from media planners and buyers. According to a recent Media Life survey on new media advertising and the areas of promising growth, asked to finish the statement: “Twitter is,” 52 percent agreed with this statement: “For twits. I predict we’ll look back on this silly craze as the Friendster of 2009. It holds little promise for advertisers (or anyone else).” As for social media generally, more than half of planners and buyers see a future emerging at some point.

Sourced: http://www.adotas.com/2009/08/facebooks-next-step-in-crushing-twitter/