Jon Cronin’s Stream Of Consciousness

Just returned from the 140 Character Conference and the amount of Twitter Kool-Aid being drunk over there would fill the “Fail Whale” up with enough blubber to last a lifetime. The conference had the usual mix of Twitter superstars, celebrities and venture capitalists to go around and it was energetic, exciting and full of “we are changing the world” love. I had a blast, relearned some things I knew already and tweeted out some great quotes from some of the speakers, but I left with a lacking feeling that something was missing? Then it hit me. What it was missing was Facebook. While we were tweeting Facebook was redesigning it’s self yet again to deal with the competitive threat lurking in the form of a pretty blue bird. As of now Facebook will be launching a tool to let users post public status updates. They also will be able to subscribe to the public status feed of users, in a model that’s similar to Twitter. Another strategic and nimble move by Facebook coupled with the recent announcement of the upcoming launch of Facebook search has Twitter lovers a little scared. Facebook Pages will also have a “follow” feature as well. This is great for marketers because now brands will have the ability to be seen outside the walled garden that was once Facebook and have more reasons to develop cross platform spreading strategies that will feed into each social network and beyond