The war between the two major social networking sites just got more interesting last week with Facebook introducing several features which are apparently aimed at making the very basic status posting function of twitter appear like a toy.
One of these features which are very much similar to Twitter is Ticker. Ticker appears on the right hand side of your Facebook profile page and automatically scribbles you’re various activities like which song you are listening to Rdio or Spotify, your new friends, you’re tagged photographs, what all you liked and also the commenting marathon. Eventually Ticker may also show app-specific activities like reading and hiking.
Facebook’s plans behind introducing Ticker may be resonated in the words of noted comedian Chelsea Peretti when she quips “I’ll quit Twitter since Facebook has this constantly updating feed of my friend’s activity on the upper right side now!”. Well quitting might be too drastic, but definitely users will spend more time on Facebook than twitter.
However the battle is not yet lost for twitter as many facebook users notes twitter to be “a source of genuine updates” and ticker to be “feeds of all the crap you wouldn’t really wish to know.”
Of course it would rather be nice to follow the firehose of breaking news and glib commentary available in Twitter feeds than become party to the highly un-amusing fact that someone we met at a conference and someone we don’t really know are now friends.
So perhaps twitter still wins over Ticker. Anyhow while criticizing Ticker we almost forgot that twitter too has its own version of Ticker, a quite subtle and decent Activity Tab. Though on tends to forget the twitter Activity tab because it’s not in your face all the time, but it too reveals about your whereabouts on the social networking platform, if you would only click through it, it’s as much revealing about you as Ticker.
As it appears, both Facebook and Twitter have realized the same nuisance and who knows one day the subtle Activity Tab may become more “right there in your face” than Ticker gaining prominence on the homepage? After all, Facebook was following much of this activity whole time, just not making it visible enough.
