noobatlife

Last week it emerged that Facebook is on the verge of launching a new publishing feature dubbed the ‘Everyone’ button. In case you missed the coverage, its basically a way to publish your status updates/links/pictures/etc to publicly despite an otherwise private profile. Great for when you want everyone to know whats happening in Iran (how topical of me), but don’t nessisarly want them to know where you’re meeting friends for dinner.

This is a fantastically cunning move by Facebook, and one that I think is going to really going to make things hard for Digg & Twitter. Once you give the 200 million odd facebook users the ability to contribute to the ‘public stream’ in a way that allows privacy when they require you open a whole new world of possibilties.

It doesn’t take a genius (hence my post) to figure out where they’re going with this:

Digg Killer – Add a ‘Dislike’ button to go with ‘Like’, rank popular popular posts and you have Digg.com for the mainstream. Digg would really need to come up with something special to fend off this fight, as their concept is pretty simple at its heart.

Twitter Killer – Allow users to ‘follow’ users public feed without being a friend, and make the stream searchable for extra points.

People often scoff at the $10 Billion valuable given to Facebook, but given the sheer power the network has to destory other startups I don’t think its far off the mark. So long as they contiune to deliver strong products, comparable to any compitition they’re always going to win.

So good luck Digg, Twitter – you’re going to need it.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 9:16 am and is filed under Random.