Contrary to the bloggerati's chatter from a few weeks ago, Twitter's biggest competitor is not Jaiku. Rather, it's Facebook. With Facebook's new ability to update via SMS, Facebook is Twitter plus:
- aggregated feeds from outside sources
- significant personal / professional profile information available from members
- large networks of friends to draw from
- events, and groups to participate in
- conversation threads
- fine-grained privacy control
- a large audience already acquired
… and the list goes on. As others have noticed, it's a killer combination.
Yes, it's true that Facebook can't deliver updates to my IM client the way that Twitter can (or at least, I haven't found that feature yet), but I am personally about to turn that feature on Twitter off. While it's interesting to get a real time stream of tweets from my friend, it's also a disturbance during meetings, and actually interferes with getting real work done on the mobile phone.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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