Meet the New Twitter, a.k.a. Facebook Lite

When sharing something online, I often face the ambivalent choice of whether to post it on Twitter of Facebook. With Twitter you can reach more people but it only supports linking, whereas a Facebook update can have pretty embedded photos and videos. Yesterday Twitter rolled out some new features, however, that make the two services more alike.

The "New Twitter" changes the site's basic layout. You still have you feeds in a nice, clean strip, but it's pushed off to the left, and on the right you can view individual tweets in expanded windows. If those tweets happen to contain links to YouTube videos or Flickr pics, they'll be automatically embedded. Here's the official Twitter video showing the changes:When sharing something online, I often face the ambivalent choice of whether to post it on Twitter of Facebook. With Twitter you can reach more people but it only supports linking, whereas a Facebook update can have pretty embedded photos and videos. Yesterday Twitter rolled out some new features, however, that make the two services more alike.

The "New Twitter" changes the site's basic layout. You still have you feeds in a nice, clean strip, but it's pushed off to the left, and on the right you can view individual tweets in expanded windows. If those tweets happen to contain links to YouTube videos or Flickr pics, they'll be automatically embedded. Here's the official Twitter video showing the changes:



The New Twitter hasn't reached us just yet, but you can only appreciate the improved functionality. We're not sure if those embeds will carry over to Facebook should you be linking your accounts on both sites, but if they don't, they should.

More to the point is what this says about Twitter and social networks in general. For a long time Twitter was content in its basic premise: 140-character updates that you share with the world. But with the recent addition of location sharing and now multimedia, at what point does it lose its flavor and become something else? And if Twitter becomes more like Facebook, why use both?

Ah, but I probably wouldn't use it. None too many of a point for me, I'm afraid.