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Like Twitter But With More Characters. See? We’re Totally Different

So I’m about three weeks late on this one, but anyway I just stumbled across this blog post explaining Facebook’s philosophy behind their latest redesign.

When I first saw it I thought that the philosophy behind the redesign was “let’s try and make Facebook look as much like Twitter as possible and maybe all the people going on and on about Twitter will come back and start talking about us again…” but for some reason Zuckerberg doesn’t mention this at all.

He does say…

In 2007, we popularized the term Social Graph to describe how Facebook maps out people’s connections.

Jeez. Yeah, I remember 2007. You couldn’t move without someone talking about the Social Graph. Social Graph this. Social Graph that. It was everywhere. By December I was sick of hearing about the Social Graph, frankly.

But mostly he talks about how they’ve made Facebook as much like Twitter as possible. In fact, why not read through the whole thing but in your head add “Just Like Twitter!” to the end of every sentence:

Starting today, we are announcing new profiles for public figures and organizations. Just like Twitter! Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. Just like Twitter! These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. Just like Twitter! You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. Just like Twitter! This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe. Just like Twitter!

We’re also going to make some changes to the home page. The new home page will let you see everything that’s shared by your friends and connections as it happens. Just like Twitter!

And so on. It’s a fun game for all the family.

Sorry Zuckerberg, you’ll just have to face up to the fact that you’re no longer the hottest property on the web. I mean, do you have Stephen Fry? Can I use your social networking service to shout messages in his direction? No? Sorry. Not interested, and no amount of rearranging the deckchairs is going to change things. But don’t worry, it’ll happen to Twitter too, eventually.