I believe Facebook at the ‘flip of a switch’ can position itself to be a strong competitor to Twitter.

The power of a users’ status update on Facebook is strong — it’s not only been amplified in terms of prominence and attention on the website redesign, but more importantly it has socially been habitual by users to be updated frequently.

If you think about the fact that Twitter is now mainstream and people not entrenched into the tech industry (like my sister and my Starbucks barista) are now being introduced accepting this concept of real-time status updates wherever they go (a.k.a microblogging). Right now, this socialization or concept of receiving real-time updates is being facilitated by Twitter, it’s a “learning curve” for the masses (much like FB Newsfeed was when it was first introduced).

That said, I believe that if Facebook waits for Twitter to go through it’s life cycle of popularity — when ready they could activate the sending of status updates to Facebook users’ phones. Right now, users are required to complete the complex task of editing your ‘mobile’ settings and manually adding specifically whom you’d like to receive status updates directly to your phone.

Imagine if when you added a new friend you were prompted with “Would you like to receive mobile status updates from this person?” Or, what if, in the Newsfeed, next to users’ status updates, an icon appeared that instantly added them to your preferred mobile updates list when clicked?

technical rendering drawing done by Ramsey

While I understand Twitter is much more robust in terms of how it can be used, I’m wondering if this is in the works for Facebook? I would be a BIG fan of this feature. My social graph is much more trusted on Facebook. This is because I’m a huge proponent of keeping your Facebook social graph “clean”.

My point is; Twitter might be doing a great service to Facebook- which is socializing the real-time status update concept to the masses — and ultimately Facebook can add-in feature sets reminiscent (if not identical) to Twitter when they want to. The question is, how long should they wait to add it in? Or should they even do it?
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