Facebook announced today that over the next few weeks they will be rolling out functionality of a new @Mentions feature for status updates. This feature takes a cue from Twitter to tag specific users and brands into your updates, essentially creating a networked conversation. Like Twitter, those you tag must be on Facebook for the tags to have any meaning. Facebook, however, boasts 25 times more users, meaning that a brand (think @Starbucks) has a VERY compelling reason to retool their social media strategy to engage users on FB.
To some this seems like the battle royale between the scrappy little upstart Twitter, and the scrappy big upstart Facebook. The gauntlet has been thrown. Some have predicted that this direct threat by Facebook against Twitter will ultimately prove so deadly that Twitter is laid to waste. I tend to disagree, and here’s why:
Twitter users tend to be much more fanatical.
Twitter is still an emergent technology within an emerging technology space. Certainly Oprah’s endorsement of the service generated some momentum for the brand, but 10 million users does not a mainstream make. This is still leading edge stuff, with a lot of white space yet to explore.
Facebook users tend to prefer to segregate their personal from professional endeavors.
I believe that this is an artifact of the generation of users who grew up getting warned repeatedly to guard their privacy and security online at all costs. That said, the Millennial generation grew up with a near-total integration of their on- and off-line identities. So I believe that the walls between personal, private, and professional will continue to fall, or at least get rearranged.
Real-time search is in its infancy.
The internet that Google built is fundamentally based on an indexing system that ranks pages based on the content of the site, and the links to and from that site. But as the vast ocean of data continues to grow, indexing may get replaced by more authentic methods of determining search results. Companies like wowd.com and several others are introducing new search methods that provide real time search results. I suspect that such technologies will have a real impact on how people interact with one another online.
The internet in your hand.
As broadband access via mobile device continues to grow, and devices such as the iPhone and smartphones continue to gain marketshare, people will increasingly access the internet via their handset. Even today, augmented reality applications are changing the way people interact with the world around them. While there are a handful of applications for interacting with Twitter or Facebook available for your phone, they are still in their infancy. As the infrastructure develops, so will the market for and engagement in handheld internet access, which will impact our daily lives in subtle and not so subtle ways.
No crystal ball, but these are my thoughts. You?
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