Facebook Could Kill Twitter

A couple of months ago, I spent some time playing with Twitter. After experimenting with Twitter, I finally saw the application as a potential business tool and the future of applications like presence and collaboration. However, now that I've transitioned into a regular user of Facebook and its mobile applications, I think there is a good chance Facebook could kill Twitter.How, you may ask, could Facebook kill Twitter? Twitter is a microblogging application and Facebook is a social network. They're not even remotely comparable. Right?

Well, Facebook is a really good microblogging tool, too. By simply editing my status section at the top of my profile, I can instantly send a Twitter-like update to all my friends on Facebook. Isn't that microblogging? I also can send all kinds of status updates, both directly and indirectly, through my Facebook feed.

And thanks to the growing number of applications in Facebook, I can share content and create new forms of interaction, too. Facebook is doing a great job of turning content sharing, tagging, and, yes, microblogging, into a continual networked communications tool. In a sense, this does everything Twitter does and so much more. Since I have way more friends on Facebook than on Twitter, I just stopped updating my Twitter account.

Of course, I also could just splice my Twitter feed into my Facebook profile, but frankly, I don't see the point in that. Facebook can do all of this and more.

What about mobility, I hear you ask? Isn't Twitter's real differentiator the fact that it's mobile and always on? Well, Facebook is mobile, too. You can access and edit your Facebook profile from a smartphone as well as follow your friends with text message updates. Facebook already has this covered, too.

While I think that Twitter could still be a valuable business tool, I don't see how it can add more value than Facebook. Plus, Facebook has the potential to do so much more with the combination of its applications program and its vastly larger user base.

Most of the applications I predicted for Twitter a few months ago could just as easily be integrated with Facebook, including the following:

I know some techies have complained that Facebook still isn't open enough. Some bloggers, like Scott Gilbertson, claim that developers could stop supporting Facebook. While I think Gilbertson raises some valid points in his recent post -- and in this particular instance he shows how Facebook is undermining attempts by others to help make the application even more of a potential Twitter-killer than it already is -- I think Facebook will eventually realize its error here and let developers have even more access. If that happens, it's game over for Twitter.

I think Twitter realizes that it's vulnerable both to Facebook and to upstart rivals like Jaiku. That's why Twitter has been launching new applications, such as a new Gmail import feature. If Twitter has any chance of survival, it will have to create a more useful application scheme than Facebook. We'll see if they can pull it off.

What do you think? Will Facebook kill Twitter and become the new microblogging application and presence tool of the future? Or will Twitter die on its own? Or will it be acquired by Google or Yahoo?