• VentureBeat, Monday, February 9, 2009 11:48 AM

Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, social media companies offering some services that overlap, can all coexist peacefully, writes VentureBeat's MG Siegler. He points out that the blogosphere is atwitter about Facebook killing Twitter because it opened its application programming interfaces last week to allow status updates from Facebook to be passed through to other sites. In other words, the Facebook status update is now mobile. Could this signal the end for Twitter?

Highly unlikely, writes Siegler. For starters, Twitter and Facebook status updates are used for completely different reasons. As Matt Hendrickson at TechCrunch points out, Twitter users and Facebook users post largely different answers to the question "What are you doing?" Facebook users tend to answer the question directly, while Twitter users will post anything--an observation, a link to a site--that meets the 140-character limit. In fact, Siegler argues that so few people pose an answer to "What are you doing?" on Twitter that the site should just get rid of the question altogether. "Twitter is far beyond that now--that's what I use Facebook status updates for," he says.

So, rather than killing Twitter, Siegler says that a more open Facebook may actually help the microblogging site. For example, many people use services that automatically pipe Twitter updates into their Facebook status. Only now, Siegler says, you should be able to update your Facebook status using Twitter, too.

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