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Yesterday Facebook introduced interest lists.
Lists on Facebook are a great way to organize your friends and focus on the people who matter most. Starting today, you also have interest lists—a whole new way to keep up with stuff you care about and tidy up your experience on Facebook.
As they say this is a new way to organize all your subscriptions and the “stuff you care about”. From now on we will be able to control our feed and to manage it in the right way.
With just a click you can move from a list to another list.
I strongly believe that this is great, but I am not going to use it.
Why Did They Add This Feature?
Although this feature could be pretty useful for most of the Facebook’s users. The question here is why?.They have added a feature that is pretty close to what Twitter introduced years ago. From my point of view it seems that they are trying to integrate Twitter in their system.
What Facebook did in the last year was a strong effort to be at the same level of Google plus and Twitter. First, they introduced “Subscriptions” in order to let the users follow other users without being their friends. This is practically how Twitter works. Second, they introduced a list system to manage in a better way the subscriptions. Isn’t this Twitter?
Yes, This is. However Google plus had a worse behavior. They copied the diaspora’s system and then integrated part of Twitter and Facebook in their platform. Nowadays, creativity seems to be lost. The war between social networks is on and instead of fighting on innovation and ideas, they copy each other.
Should they do it? Well, Sun Tzu, once said, that in order to win over your enemy you need to know him very well; but this doesn’t mean that you have to copy its strategy or projects. This means that you must win through innovation and ideas that are able to fight what you already know.
Where Is The Social Networking World Going?
We probably don’t know the answer yet. However from what we see today, we are direct to a complete unification of the three major social networks: Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook. The only one that isn’t copying at all is Twitter, which is currently maintaining its own structure and way of acting. The other twos have integrated the Twitter’s system in their platforms.
Is The Next Big Thing In This Field?
Absolutely not. If you want to build something, the social networking industry is not the right place for you at the moment. You can’t compete against Facebook and Google. Diaspora tried it and they failed. Their system was partially copied by Google and they didn’t have the following they expected. Although they were looking for something else (and not the next big thing), they had several troubles and problems with the development of the software, which caused the slowness of the platform.
The only innovation in this field could come from these three sites, that have already a solid structure.
