Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2011. It is a news piece describing that moment: Facebook’s 600 million users, Twitter’s 200 million and its goal of doubling that in 2011, the planned Facebook email service and the beta auto-updating wall. MSN Messenger has since been shut down.
Little is known about the mindset of Zuckerberg, creator of the biggest social network of the moment, Facebook, apart from some speculation and a film that made it to the big screen. But he’s been sending one very clear message for some time: he intends to dominate the internet completely and bring down any giant that stands in his way.
If we sum up his progress, the standout point is that in the United States Facebook has now beaten Google itself in number of visits for the second month in a row. It has also driven down use of the famous “Messenger” by adding a chat to the social network, and after all, most of our Facebook contacts come from our MSN list. Now Zuckerberg plans to launch his own email service, which, whether it succeeds to a greater or lesser degree, will take users away from Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, among others.
The social network has already reached 600 million users, and its biggest competitor, which is growing at a faster rate than Facebook, is Twitter. Of course, Zuckerberg may already have found a way to get it out of the picture.
Twitter has passed 200 million users and aims to double that figure over the course of 2011. Twitter’s advantage is that it’s seen as an instant, real-time communication network that is simple and practical. Facebook has spotted the gap Twitter fills and has already taken steps.
From now on, Facebook will have an automatically updating wall. This means that whereas before you had to reload the page to see the new messages, photos or links your contacts had posted, a new plugin makes that unnecessary: in theory, every time one of your contacts posts something, it will appear on your wall automatically without reloading the page.
This simple addition is the key to Twitter’s success, so from now on Facebook will work in practically the same way as Twitter. Facebook wants to be an “all-in-one”: all the services you find in different programs and apps, you’ll have in a single program called Facebook.
The feature is still in beta, so only some users have it.
The news comes just as Twitter was celebrating that, for the first time since it was founded, it had generated millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
Facebook is pressing on unstoppably towards total domination of the internet, and frankly, that’s a little scary.
Further reading
Featured image: Robert Scoble, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
