Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Contrary to the bloggerati's chatter from a few weeks ago, Twitter's biggest competitor is not Jaiku.    Rather, it's Facebook.  With Facebook's new ability to update via SMS, Facebook is Twitter plus:

• aggregated feeds from outside sources
• significant personal / professional profile information available from members
• large networks of friends to draw from
• events, and groups to participate in
• conversation threads
• fine-grained privacy control
• a large audience already acquired

… and the list goes on.  As others have noticed, it's a killer combination.

Yes, it's true that Facebook can't deliver updates to my IM client the way that Twitter can (or at least, I haven't found that feature yet), but I am personally about to turn that feature on Twitter off.  While it's interesting to get a real time stream of tweets from my friend, it's also a disturbance during meetings, and actually interferes with getting real work done on the mobile phone.