Facebook might have come before Twitter, but it only really snowballed into the social media juggernaut that it is in the past year or soâ€" right about the same time that Twitter was starting its meteoric climb to popularity. Until recently the two sites really had two different purposes - you meet new people on Twitter, you stay connected with people you already know on Facebook. But it appears early on this year Facebook started getting pretty envious of Twitter's popularity.
First they adopted Twitter's very attractive concept of the ability to offer vanity URLs. And people loved them because, well, people are vain. It was a nice start, but that in and off itself wasn't enough to make it look like Facebook was gunning for Twitter. It actually looked kind of desperate and sad, like a balding 40-something trying to wear Ed Hardy (sorry Jon).
And then people noticed a new rising star - Friendfeed. For a while there it looked like Friendfeed was poised to take over Twitter's space; after all, they offered everything Twitter did and more. It just didn't catch on at first. But once Friendfeed started gaining traction in Twitter's space Facebook swooped in and bought them. And they bought them fairly early, before the price tag went any higher ($50M). At that point we all knew Twitter was making Facebook nervous, and the game was on.
Twitter's response? Several server outages in the middle of the day while they made a pretty new interface for adding friends. And oh yeah, they also pissed everyone off by deleting hundreds of followers at once, blaming it on spammers and bots.
Yesterday Facebook took the biggest swipe at Twitter's jugular by offering direct @ replies in status updates. Not only is this a wholesale copy of the heart of Twitter as an application, it clearly defines Facebook's intentions of taking over Twitter's audience in social media.
While we all know and love Twitter for its simplicity, it appears its going to have a hard time keeping up with everything Facebook has to offer. If you want to see how a hostile takeover is done, keep an eye on Facebook. They're doing it right.