Facebook Lite
The Facebook PR machine were in overdrive yesterday, reporting that they now have more than 300 million users worldwide and are making a profit a year ahead of schedule, with their business mantra appearing to be: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
With the serious market share threat served up by Twitter, Facebook has continued to tweak its user interface and has incorporated many functions that have seen Facebookers flock to Twitter in their droves.
Social Media Platforms
But Facebook have been cute in basically ripping off Twitter in order to encourage those that use both social media platforms to return to Facebook given its broader range of functions.
And with the introduction of Facebook Lite, which is aimed at those that are new to Facebook, have limited bandwidth, or preferred the platform before it became cluttered with ‘boxes’, funwalls and so on.
It is a basic form of the platform that resembles the early editions of Facebook, which is no bad thing and will make users who endlessly complain about updates happy as they can return to a more basic GUI.
Facebook Hashtags
This simplified version is akin to Twitter in more ways than just the decluttered interface with the latest tweak on both Facebook platforms being the tagging feature that Twitter is famous for. You can now tag friends in status updates or messages by typing ‘@’ followed by the name of the recipient.
This ‘new’ feature will develop in the coming weeks as you will soon be able to tag from apps also. The introduction of Facebook hashtags is surely on the horizon.
Mashable’s associate editor, Ben Parr, believes that the latest Facebook initiatives will have detrimental affects upon Twitter, yet I’m not convinced.
It would be interesting to find out how many of the 300 million+ users are actually active, but on the face of it, by becoming more Twitter-like, Facebook looks set to continue to grow in the world of social media, although Twitter still has the USP of celebrity users and real-time news feeds so this battle will most certainly continue to run.
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