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from e-Life: Discussions About Blackbird e-Solutions, and the Search, Tech and Localization Industries

It appears that Facebook has made another step in evolution towards being more like Twitter. The latest update allows page administrators to add mobile support to their public profiles. You can now update and receive updates for public profiles via your mobile phone. For example to become a fan of our public profile (Blackbird e-Solutions: Internet Marketing) via your mobile, send “fan Blackbird e-Solutions: Internet Marketing” to 32665.

As Facebook tries to absorb Twitters functionality into it’s site (without buying Twitter itself), there are still a few things that are missing. Quite possible the largest and most difficult thing to copy is all the apps that are built around the Twitter site, and there are a lot. Here’s a site that lists a bunch of them but I won’t venture to say that their list is complete: Twitter apps The one that I use the most is TwitterFeed. You can use this to tweet blog posts.

Another thing Facebook is missing is the fact that Twitter is a conversation. When Facebook manages to create an easy way to respond to post such as the “@username reply” on Twitter they will really be on target. But this is quite possibly a huge change to the framework of the site. Plus, copying the openess of Twitter is fundamentally against how Facebook started.

What I found most disappointing about the new mobile options for Facebook Public Profiles is that your mobile number can only be used for either a public profile you are administrating or your personal profile, not both. Theoretically this would be an easy fix. Create a new number for the public profiles, you can text the number for public profiles to update them and still be able to update your personal profile and receive updates as well.

Facebook is scrambling to grab onto to Twitter as it’s Growth rate soars. There doesn’t seem to be any other social networking site that can touch them now, but Twitter really has them scared. The next thing will be to see if users really start adopting the new Facebook mobile features…

I haven’t posted much recently partly because I have been using Facebook and Twitter a lot lately. Most of you probably know what Facebook is, but you might be wonder what heck Twitter is…

Well, it’s a free online service that you can post 140 character long updates. Kind of like a status update, things you see or what you’re doing. One of my favorites:

“Just saw random woman walking down biz 222 with a parrot on her shoulder.”

Crazy, but I did actually see that a couple of weeks ago!

You can do a lot of things with these updates. I use it to change my Facebook status. There is an app on Facebook for this. There is supposedly one for MySpace too, but I can’t seem to get it work. Another API I use is from Twitterfeed. This allows me to tweet (the act of postin on twitter) the headlines of my blog posts. I do this for both my personal and business blogs. So, I manually/randomly tweet as well as automatically tweet when TwitterFeed sends my latest blog entries to Twitter. Then this all also updates my Facebook status.

Now, all this isn’t even the most intersting part. Within Twitter people can follow and you can follow other people. That doesn’t mean if I follow you, you have to follow me. However, you shouldn’t just follow people willy nilly. Like anything there should be a reason: ie, they are in the same industry, you know them already.. you get the picture. What it means is you receive updates from the people you are following and vice verse. Right I’m following 25 and actually 25 prople are following me. Two of the people I’m following you may actually know. Lance Armstrong and Guy Kawasaki.

If you and someone else are both following each other you can then have conversations. There is an option to reply to what someone says: @reply. Or you can message them directly. So, what happens is, people have conversations.

You might be asking.. What’s the point? Well, I’m using it as another way to get my company name out there and find like minded people: Entrepreneurs, people interesting in social media, localizaion professionals, freelance translators. To name a few. One of the great things about it is that you can connect with people that you may otherwise never have had the chance to connect with.

You can check me out on Twitter by clicking on the Twitter button on the right side of the page. You can also set up your own account through the button if you don’t have one already.

The next step for me is to set up a central place for all my blog entries, twitter posts and other online activity. I know there are apps out there to do this. I just have to find the right one and get it done!