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Major Facebook Changes Coming

By Jeralyn

It may be too little too late, but Facebook is in the process of making big adjustments to become more like Twitter.

These are the changes:

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.)

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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.)

You can tour the changes here.

The best change, in my view:

And for those of us who have those friends who are always sending updates that we aren't all that interested in? Facebook will let you add a filter that will keep those updates at a minimum without "de-friending" them.

In addition to copying Twitter, the move seems designed to accomodate celebrities and organizations by making their "pages" more like the profiles of individuals.

The site will let users follow public figures like President Barack Obama or swimmer Michael Phelps or their favorite bands or sports teams.

One of my pet peeves about twitter is too many bloggers, media folks and organizations use them only as a means to promote themselves, by twittering every blog post or article and every preview of their next show. I wish people would only tweet when they have something to say or to tout a post, show or event they think is special.

At least Twitter lets you filter, or you can use Twalala. I also like TweetDeck and Search Twitter.

And while I prefer people read TalkLeft rather than a summary at Facebook or Twitter, I'll be keeping both.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 05, 2009 (boomark / email).