New Facebook App for iPhones Takes Cues from Twitter

There's nothing quite like the smell of a copy-cat early in the morning.  But then, what else would we expect of our trusty social network Facebook?  Aside from the many other cues Facebook has taken from different social platforms, when the Facebook app rolled out this morning as part of the iPhone Apps store, there were more than a few people who noticed striking similarities between the Facebook App and one rather popular micro-messaging application. 

Its hard to miss similarities between the status updates on Facebook and the micro-messaging service Twitter.  However, status updates on the web-based Facebook are fairly minor in comparison to the much more extensive profiles, applications, activity feeds and so on.  If you are so fortunate as to own an iPhone, when you download the Facebook application to your handset, you'll notice that the mobile platform has been drastically scaled back.

The new Facebook app has been scaled back to focus largely on mobile status updates and chatting with friends.  As U.S-based iPhone customers have unlimited data packages, but not necessarily unlimited text packages, the new Facebook application aims to allow users to send messages through the Facebook platform to friends for free, thereby eliminating the need to use those pesky SMS messages.  What's even more amusing is that the status update system looks like a blatant rip-off of the Twitter platform.

Of course, the benefit to being the most popular social network is that you can rip off take cues from smaller platforms and achieve greater success to boot.  If Twitter wants to grow in scope, it will have to address the mobile market just like Facebook has.  But Facebook doesn't intend to stop there, not in the slightest.

VentureBeat's Eric Eldon writes that Facebook has plans to start utilizing the iPhone 3G's GPS capabilities as well.  If you remember, during Steve Jobs' keynote at the World Wide Developer's Conference 2008, a social locating platform for the iPhone called Loopt was revealed.  Obviously Facebook has no qualms about stepping on the toes of competitors (as it shouldn't), because the plans to allow users to locate each other with the iPhone's GPS look strikingly similar to the whole concept of Loopt.  

Watch out, mobile platform developers — Facebook will happily chew on your ideas and make them exponentially more successful than they could have been with you, while showing no remorse.  

I don't think that Twitter really has that much to worry about.  The Twitter community isn't intended to be anything like Facebook, even if Facebook is taking replication liberties.  If anything, Facebook knocking off Twitter's functionality should be seen as a compliment.  I would enjoy nothing more than for Twitter to develop a fantastic mobile application that is data-based (as opposed to SMS-based), as I'd much rather stay in contact with many of my fellow tweeters than Facebook buddies.  

I suppose Twitter needs to get its current ducks in a row before worrying about a fantastic mobile application.  Baby steps are key.