It appears that Facebook has made another step in evolution towards being more like Twitter. The latest update allows page administrators to add mobile support to their public profiles. You can now update and receive updates for public profiles via your mobile phone. For example to become a fan of our public profile (Blackbird e-Solutions: Internet Marketing) via your mobile, send “fan Blackbird e-Solutions: Internet Marketing” to 32665.
As Facebook tries to absorb Twitters functionality into it’s site (without buying Twitter itself), there are still a few things that are missing. Quite possible the largest and most difficult thing to copy is all the apps that are built around the Twitter site, and there are a lot. Here’s a site that lists a bunch of them but I won’t venture to say that their list is complete: Twitter apps The one that I use the most is TwitterFeed. You can use this to tweet blog posts.
Another thing Facebook is missing is the fact that Twitter is a conversation. When Facebook manages to create an easy way to respond to post such as the “@username reply” on Twitter they will really be on target. But this is quite possibly a huge change to the framework of the site. Plus, copying the openess of Twitter is fundamentally against how Facebook started.
What I found most disappointing about the new mobile options for Facebook Public Profiles is that your mobile number can only be used for either a public profile you are administrating or your personal profile, not both. Theoretically this would be an easy fix. Create a new number for the public profiles, you can text the number for public profiles to update them and still be able to update your personal profile and receive updates as well.
Facebook is scrambling to grab onto to Twitter as it’s Growth rate soars. There doesn’t seem to be any other social networking site that can touch them now, but Twitter really has them scared. The next thing will be to see if users really start adopting the new Facebook mobile features…
