Facebook Lite: Is it a move to counter Twitter?

Finally, Facebook opened its Lite version for public preview this week. Since I was not in the testing phase, I couldn’t write anything definitive about it earlier on.

Anyway, now that I have explored it in depth, I couldn’t help establish that it is an ambitious move to counter the rising popularity of Twitter.  Facebook Lite provides twitter-like functionality and is really a stripped down version of the original Facebook. Basically it has a wall, a mail box and a capability to post photos and videos. Apart from being skinny, it has the added advantage of privacy by limiting access to a well-defined social circle.

With the recent acquisition of FriendFeed, Facebook’s most likely course of action would be the complete integration of FriendFeed technology with its Lite version in the months to come.

However, this should not come as a shock because this was rather anticipated. Given the recent media attention to Twitter, it was only natural for Facebook to come up with something to retain its user base.

This is a 10 minute guide to Twitter for newbies. If you still haven’t figured out what is Twitter and why you should use Twitter then you can start with this post.

Youtube has hundreds of Tutorials for Twitter beginners. Whether you want to get yourself started on Twitter or want to learn about some Twitter’s desktop tools, the following YouTube videos will keep you entertained while educating you about various aspects of Twitter.

1. Twitter Tutorials – Getting Started

2. Twitter in Plain English

3. Top Twitter Tools Exposed

4. Twitter Tutorials – 5 Desktop Apss

5. TweetChat – Letterman – Kevin Spacey Tweets with Dave

Yesterday, Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business, a guide for getting started and establishing your business using Twitter. It covers all basics of Twitter, how to get started, terms, keywords, and includes case studies. Here is what Twitter says about their business guide:

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

This business guide would be a really important move as a big number of Twitter starters are quitting to use Twitter.

It did not occur to me as a surprise, when StumbleUpon decided to launch their new URL shortening service “Su.pr” back in June, 2009. Starting your own URL shortening service is not a new thing these days, Digg and Twit this services are already doing it.


There are other popular URL shortening services also available like TinyURL, bit.ly and is.gd. Ever since the popularity of Twitter, use of such URL shortening services is doubled.

But the features for su.pr are not limited to URL shortening only. It also lets you see live clicks response on your shortened URL. You can also connect directly to Twitter and Facebook and post the shortened URL direct on those web sites.

The best feature it offers is the time setup for your posts. You can choose what time of the day it should submit your post. The Su.Pr Wordpress Plugin has also been made available for download.

I personally liked su.pr very much and i’m really looking to make some good use of it.

Twitter has updated their pages with some new cool features. These pages, which you get to by clicking following/follower counts on any any user profile now show more details about other Twitter users.

A much needed functionality, to check who is following you is available. Twitter now shows a check mark of the people you follow back. There’s a drop-down menu that includes options for direct message, sending them an @ mention, following them or blocking them.

Meanwhile on the page listing people you follow, there are options for sending them a mention, unfollowing, or if they follow you, sending them a direct message.

This was a much needed feature, now its very easy to keep track if someone is following you or not.

The most interesting Twitter has launched within this update, these options are not only available on your profile but also on any profile you visit.  So, you can check any friend or co-worker’s profile  and check the same for them.  In all, it appears that Twitter is more focusing on user desired features.

Another scam to attempt to steal our social networking passwords is underway this week. This time the target is Twitter, and this scam invovles fake Twitter blogs.

Tweets saying “omg!! is it true what they wrote about you in their twit blog?” are going out from effected user’s profiles. These scams are linking to sbudomain of the site twitterblogs.com in tweets. When clicked, the linked site looks exactly like Twitter’s homepage. In case, you enter your user id and password it tweets out the message mentioned above, and scam spreads.

On Saturday, Britney Spears tweeter profile also got hacked and it posted a tweet saying “Britney has passed today. It is a sad day for everyone. So the last week was quite fun.

However, it appears like tweets for Twittersblogs have stopped but be aware for any similar scams.

The tribute song to Michael Jackson is touching the new download heights. The song rapidly spread through social media. This song features Usher, Diddy, Mario Winans, Chris Brown, The Game, Boyz2Men and various other leading artists.

Diddly tweeted the link to his almost 1 million plus followers on Twitter, making this song the top tweet search for last two days. The song is hosted on Box.net and is available for free download. Box.net has also shared its visitors stats and they have achieved a download figure of 100,000(remarkable) which was already expected.

The impact of Jackson’s death has been felt web-wide; therefore yesterday was huge raise in online activities regarding the King of Pop.  However, it seems, Jackson continues to break records even after its death.

Download Song

One of the most popular features of the facebook is your status box – aka, the “what’s on your mind?” box on your homepage, this box lets you share almost everything, links, videos, photos and much more….

Yesterday Facebook announced a new enhanced functionality with this status, which will let users control the privacy settings around each status updates they post to Facebook. Now everyone will be able to specify whether they want to update the world or just a select group of friends from status drop down.

This new status publisher will have a lock icon in the lower right hand corner, where users can select to share updates with everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends, just friend or anyone from your custom created list.  It’s important to note that the share with everyone option is essentially going to make your Facebook status updates public domain, and this has major implications for the upcoming facebook search.

So, why facebook has added this feature? According to Facebook’s blog, “You may have some posts you want to share with a wide audience, such as whom you voted for or how great the weather is today. Other times you may have more personal updates like your new phone number or an invitation to join you at your favorite restaurant for dinner that is meant for only close or nearby friends.”

But this new added feature may also happen to be a groundwork being done for upcoming Facebook Search. By giving users this option to share content publicly, privately, Facebook now can easily distinguish between unwanted appearances of search results. This will help some Facebook users looking to use their status for advertising as well Facebook themselves to build a better Search Product. Also as Facebook are looking to compete Twitter Search so it should be a part of that strategy too.

Related Topics: Learn Facebook Privacy Settings

A few days earlier twitter has announced in their blog that all twitter users now can only follow 1000 other users each day. This dicision is based upon the regular scam spread on twitter these days.

This dicision may not matter to normal users who just use twitter to get in touch with their family and friends but it will definately matter to marekters or self-promoters to rapidly increase their Twitter follower count by following many people.  Because the strategy of following excessive number of users does matter really. Unlike many may expect people do follow you back which is a positive sign for marketers.

People among who follow such methods are social media enthusiasts or consultants, some are internet marketers or bloggers. All of them are people who want to get something in return. Major focus of all such people are the following things:

1. Money. The goal is to monetize Twitter users by linking and recommending products or services, either their own or others if they are an affiliate. They do this by tweeting out links and sending automated direct messages with the same offers when someone follows them back.
2. Build their Name/Brand. Such followers aim to improve their reputation and build their brand. If you have thousands of followers on twitter that also gives the impression that you or your theme is popular. People tend to follow such people more.  They also use their followers to boost their prominence on other social arenas like Digg or Facebook.
3. Get more visitors. Followers = Visitors, more visitors means more subscribers, readers and contributors to your website. Once you have all these things, you do have a successfull website and more money.

It’s a simple strategy. The more followers you have, the more people listen to you, and the easier it is to spread your messages.

But do you really need a large number of followers to promote yourself successfully on Twitter? The answer is no. Not at all. But many people still persist in mass following users. Let’s look at some of the reasons why you don’t need to use this marketing tactic.

More to Follow ……..

A lawsuit was the final thing required to push twitter into launching verified accounts now. Twitter has been dealing with a lawsuit from St. Lous Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa. The lawsuit is about an individual impersonating La Russa on Twitter. Twitter still does not have any systematic way to verify if any tweets were real or bogus.

This seems to be the reason that Twitter has announced verified accounts beta program so they do not have to handle any future lawsuits for such reasons.

Twitter Accounts Beta

Yesterday, Twitter stated the following on the La Russa case:

Reports this week that Twitter has settled a law suit and officially agreed to pay legal fees for an impersonation complaint that was taken care of by our support staff in accordance with our Terms are erroneous. Twitter has not settled, nor do we plan to settle or pay.

Actually, Twitter did not settle on this case but it pushed them to announce for these verified accounts program.

So what and how exactly will this verified account system will work? According to the Twitter blog, there will be a special seal on any account that is verirified by Twttier as being authentic. You can see this very seal in the image above, will appear at the top right of profile pages. This is targeted towards public officals, public agencies, athletes, celeberities and other high-profile indviduals.

As to how actual verification will work, it seems that Twitter will look to see if an official channel of the person in question links to his or her Twitter account from a place like an official website. This is a perfectly logical way to verify accounts, in our opinion. Details are scarce on the full plan, though.

The Verified Accounts program will begin as an experiment this summer and will expand as Twitter gets more feedback. We’re glad to finally see a system in place that will hopefully put an end to impersonators and expensive lawsuits.