Ever since Twitter snubbed its moves of a takeover, Facebook has been upping its features to seem more and more like Twitter. The first one caused a major furor on the web, when they overhauled the entire Facebook home page of profiles to look more like a Twitter timeline. While users might have now got used to it, it certainly has dented Facebook’s appeal as something separate from Twitter (ever so slightly).
And now Mashable reports that Facebook has a new feature that looks remarkably similar to Twitter’s follower feature.
Look closely and you’ll see the new option to receive an email notification whenever another Facebook user “Connects to me as a fan.” In other words, Facebook followers, here we come.
What Mashable is pointing is the new option that users will find in their Account settings’ email notification area, which let’s us choose Facebook to send a notification when someone connects to a profile as a fan. It is important to note that this feature hasn’t been released yet, the update just confirms the fact that such a move is likely in the future.
The feature works this way, say you want to befriend a celebrity or a power user on FB, chances are likely that your friend request might go unnoticed by them. The new feature (whenever it will launch) will let you become a fan of that profile cementing your allegiance to the person or his work, just like you do with for brands.
There are two ways to look at these developments (the life stream FB, fans for profiles, pages as friends, vanity urls). On one hand it can be seen as a fight or one upmanship with Twitter because it has a set of very similar features on the face of things. On the other hand, which I think is more likely is that these have been plans Facebook has been having since quite sometime, and perhaps planning to acquire Twitter was more a strategic move to execute these plans faster.
If the latter is the case, then it sort of sheds light on where the industry innovators in this case FB and Twitter, think social media is heading. It can also define the environment in which brands have to work considering the dimming lines between people and pages on these sites. We probably might be looking at a social site where names and physical attributes notwithstanding it is the personality that pages and profiles and what they do matter more. It is not a clear thought and probably needs more introspection. There are possibilities that maybe even these website aren’t aware of the extent to which things can change with their feature updates in the way communication happens.
Nevertheless, it certainly brings some interesting times on to how media and communication is going to happen in a not so distant future.
