Who’s really taking over?

No doubt you’ve heard this week about the notion the Facebook are taking over the web.

But in the process they’re causing a huge backlash over genuine concerns about privacy, spreading its presence on “Partner websites” and further eyeball-tracking.

Doesn’t it all seem like they’re growing Facebook with features that suit them? Not us? Creepy, isn’t it?

But have a look at that tweet above. Twitter have just launched a hack that lets you paste tweets into your blog posts and other content. Much easier than taking a screen-grab of a tweet, re-sizing and ‘saving for web’. Much easier to just paste a bit of code in.

That to me, sounds like something that was designed for us.

And that sums it up. Facebook aren’t really interested in their audience anymore. Only the advertisers. Twitter, on the other hand seem to be focused on their audience, and not so much the advertisers (well,maybe a bit). Ultimately, that’s why Twitter will stay on for a while, and why Facebook might need to get ready for a mass exodus.

(Plus the fact that the only human contact you really ever get anymore are your aunties’ Farmville updates, people talking their breakfast, or friend requests from that kid at school that you never liked, who’s facebook profile makes me think he’s more recently become a sex offender – but that’s a whole other blog post)

I like the way that Om Malik sum’s it up:

social networking is simply embedding itself into services, like say MOG or Last.fm. They are not social networks in the classic sense – aka like Bebo or Facebook or MySpace – but they essentially are social networks. They use the technology to enhance online experiences, which are the things we want to be doing. After all, life doesn’t happen, online or off, inside a MySpace page.

Replace MySpace with Facebook and the argument still stands.