Which One Of These Is Much Like The Other? Facebook Facelift Targets Twitter

Facebook Wednesday unveiled several changes to its home page and news feed designed to transform it into a "realtime" platform—a direct challenge to Twitter and other microblogging services that rely on streams of constant status updates.

"As people share more, the timeline gets filled in more and more with what is happening with everything you're connected to," wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, explaining the changes in a Facebook blog posting Wednesday. "The pace of updates accelerates. This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it."

The five moves, with their Twitter analogues, include the following:

1. Facebook changed its home page to allow streaming of posts from Facebook friends in realtime. (Twitter updates immediately as people post.)

2. Facebook enabled filtering for those realtime updates, letting users filter those status updates by friends, applications and other groupers. (You can filter a bit on Twitter but have better options in Twitter filtering applications like twalala.)

3. Facebook tweaked the "What are you doing right now?" status bar, which now asks, "What's on your mind?" (Twitter's prompt is "What are you doing?")

4. Facebook lifted the 5,000-friend limit on Facebook friends a user can have, making them unlimited. (Twitter doesn't limit the number of fellow Tweeters you can follow.)

5. Facebook pages are now called "profiles." (Twitter has one type of profile for everybody.)

"Once called Pages, these new profiles will now begin looking and functioning just like user profiles," Zuckerberg said. "Just as you can connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already."

Facebook's new home page goes up next week, and the social networking giant has posted a home page tour for users to see the changes in action.

As the news arrived from Facebook Wednesday, a number of sources suggested the "Twitterization" of Facebook was probably too little too late—the changes are seen as a catch-up to Twitter, not exactly an improvement.

Although Zuckerberg has never hid his admiration for Twitter, Facebook abandoned an attempt to buy Twitter in December.