Twitter Going Through A Facebookification Phase?

If someone tweeted a video link to you earlier on Twitter, then you would have been directed from Twitter to the video sharing website. You couldn’t watch videos on Twitter itself. But all this changed when Twitter introduced on-site multimedia sharing recently, leaving many users wondering whether Twitter is undergoing some sort of Facebookification phase.

Multimedia Marvel

As Twitter now supports multimedia sharing capabilities, you can watch videos on the website itself. If you click a link to a video, it will be embedded in the stream and you can watch it without navigating away from the website. Twitter also didn’t support image attachments of any sort earlier, but now that it does, you can watch and share images with your followers.

Facebook has supported multimedia capability for a long time. This is one of the reasons why Facebook is so immensely popular; people can log on as sit all day browsing through photo albums, watching videos, adding new friends and uploading their own pictures and videos. While Twitter and Facebook differ greatly, they do at times try and emulate the other’s tricks and innovations

Facebookification of Twitter after Twitterification of Facebook?

Some time ago, Facebook was copying from Twitter. Now, Twitter is returning the favor by copying from Facebook. Like Facebook, Twitter is slowly but surely morphing itself into a website where people can while away hours of their time by browsing through photos and videos. Twitter, like Facebook, is now enjoying wide support from multimedia partners for web videos and live streams across several platforms.

Facebook generates a lot of revenue through advertising, and multimedia support allows it to attract members as well as advertisers. Twitter is hoping to generate more revenue by letting users share multimedia. Twitter, even though it calls itself an “information network website”, can now be categorized as a “social information network website” after this ongoing Facebookification phase.

There is More

People used to log on to twitter to check their Tweets. Now, they have more incentive to log on, because now they can check back for pictures, videos as well as tweets. Twitter is very cleverly ensuring that user interest in the website stays high. But multimedia is not the only feature that characterizes this Facebook phase. Twitter, in the recent months, has been quietly adding other features that hint strongly at Facebook origins.

The “You Both Follow” offering on Twitter helps you showcase your interests. On Facebook, people “like” a certain page or group. Obviously, these two are very similar. Facebook can be accessed on the Blackberry, iPhone, Android and other platforms. The Facebook design is standardized across all these platforms, giving users a sense of continuity. Twitter is following suit, and has made its intentions clear after acquiring Tweetie, which would allow it to provide a sense of continuity across several platforms as well.

Twitter is trying to portray itself as a place where you can spend your entire day, just like Facebook. The Facebookification phase is being implemented with exactly this object in mind.