• GigaOm/Online Media Daily, Thursday, March 5, 2009 11:30 AM

Facebook launched several new features that many say take a direct shot at Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to acquire late last year. Twitter is all about real-time communication, while Facebook has been focused on fueling communication through interactivity. With the launch of these new features, however, Facebook is now moving more towards more real-time communication, says GigaOm's Brendan Gahan.

The social networking giant announced changes, reported in Online Media Daily, to its home page that would allow streaming "posts from your friends in real-time." Facebook also changed its status prompt from "What are you doing right now?" to "What's on your mind?" It also dumped the limit on the number of friends you can have (for those who never maxed out, the limit was 5,000). "Facebook Pages" has also been eradicated. Celebrities and companies that had fan pages will now simply have profiles instead. "Real-time web, as we've argued in the past, is the next logical step in the Internet's evolution," says Gahan. And while "Facebook is smart to be addressing the Twitter question...we wonder if these attempts by Facebook may be a case of too little too late. With exponential growth, a new round of capital, and developers creating innovative apps on the platform, Twitter is well positioned to ride out the roadblocks Facebook is putting in its way. Furthermore, as Facebook adapts its platform to stave off the Twitter threat, it will be interesting to see how the community reacts, as they've been notably resistant to change."

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