There was a lot of blogsphere buzz about the Facebook's move to open an API for status updates and speculation that this might kill twitter (see more here, here and here). I doubt the direct impact on twitter is going to be that dramatic (for similar reasons as those given by Hypeup and Fred Wilson - the competition isn't direct) but what's more interesting is the massive trend it shows to what Fred Wilson labelled The "Realtime" Web (Google Latitude is another annoncement which plays into this space this week).
As pointed out Facebook relies on a "friend model" in which both parties need to be connected to one another, whereas twitter's feeds are by default public and followable by anybody. This makes facebook a more private/personal medium than twitter and less a form of public communication. What both have in common though is that updates are highly time sensitive, contextual updates. I.e. they are to blogging what IM was to email. API connections for these service look they'll massively increase the potential for near real time applications across the web.
It used to require huge engineering effort to put together an application which 1) communicated with users on multiple devices, 2) linked content from multiple communities and 3) worked in real time - now it almst functions out of the box. Add to that the availability of all sorts of other data and processing via APIs and a lot of things become possible.
Facebook status also throws down the gauntlet to other social networking sites to open status streams - Latitude and Fireeagle are doing the same for location, which will mean pretty soon we should be able to get this data from pretty much anywhere. Hmm... looks like we might need a kind of standard backbone to share it... better be one which is more or less neutral ... hmmm - maybe? twitter?!
Anyway, for now what makes, twitter a different animal to facebook status is the focus of the medium - facebook is 100% people centric, twitter on the other hand alredy has a whole host of other faces: from corporate streams to system uptime alerts and a whole bunch of other stuff. Essentially twitter provides an alert broadcast backbone for anything (not just anyone).
Looks like exciting times are ahead for new Apps!
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