Facewitter +

What do you do when your competitions start ganging up on you? No no, you don’t try using your wits to win them over, nor do you try to innovate and create something groundbreaking, you try so hard, almost laughably hard, to become them! At least that is what Facebook has been trying to do for the past month or two.

If you have been paying close attention to Facebook, you most certainly have noticed the ability to tag people in posts, by typing the “@” symbol, followed by your friend’s name, this is pure twitter, a few weeks later, Facebook changes the style in which you tag people in pictures, now it says “Your name” with “Your friends’ names”, which, is to some extent, pretty minor in comparison to what will follow. A few days ago, I noticed something weird with the Facebook header, it wasn’t updating properly, that’s one thing, and another, was that it wasn’t statically placed at the top of the page, where it’s always at, it moves with you when you scroll down, a la Twitter, which, granted, could prove as a nice addition, but, at least make it update right! Another thing is the “Subscribe” option, that’s also been added yesterday, or the day before, it’s another word for Twitter’s “Follow”, works exactly the same way too! You subscribe to people, without adding them as friends, and all their activities are shown in your home feed, again much like Twitter.

What I noticed today when I was checking my profile, is a small new section to the left of the page called “Lists”, just above the Groups section that was also added recently, these lists were named “Close Friends”, “Family”, “GUC” (my college), and “People near Cairo”??? Was Facebook actually copying Google +’s circles? To my surprise, it was… The “new” lists functionality works exactly like how the Google + circles work, you add a bunch of people, and you share stuff with only them, you can also start updating your status like you normally would and adjust the lists you want the status to be shown to.

Not to mention of course the plethora of privacy changes happening throughout Facebook, which isn’t exactly encouraging, since one can easily miss one of those privacy changes, and his/her entire profile could be visible publicly, to everyone!

Facebook is slowly losing its identity, and I for one, really don’t want to give up on it, Facebook might soon become the new My_____ or Hi5 (is Hi5 still even there?), if it keeps going this way, I wouldn’t be surprised in seeing a “Sign in with Twitter/Google+” button next to Facebook’s “Sign Up” button, it’s sad but true…