Facebook vs. Twitter - ‘A Division of The Spoils’

Lately, I have been working quite a bit on Facebook, primarily R & D for a prospective client project (in Marketing Research). Perusing through Facebook-related blogs, one posting stands out – ‘How Facebook Could Kill Twitter Overnight’. The premise is - if the Facebook API call ‘Users.getInfo’ includes the user’s status update – it would mean the demise of Twitter overnight!  Sounds very interesting indeed – developers will be thankful and Facebook would save $500m (part of which would belong to Microsoft). Unfortunately, the blog post claims that Facebook does not have the developer resources available to build the status updates internally – this is a weak argument.

Good post and some very good responses (comments) to the post. I am of the opinion - why not do it? it appears that Facebook would have more to gain (broader demographics) and the market would sort out ‘the division of the spoils’.