Lost in Phoenix

Oh, Facebook. I love you, but you will never be Twitter.

Twitter, I love you, but your inflexible 140-character limit is, well, limiting.

But I wish you’d go to your separate corners and stop fighting each other.

Facebook’s attempt to steal Twitter’s audience was perhaps never more blatant than when they introduced Facebook Lite on September 10 of this year. Facebook Lite pares Facebook down to just the news feed — a welcome service for those who find the constant stream of application invitations irritating.

At the same time, Facebook enabled tagging friends in status updates — by using the Twitter-like “@name” command.

The result of both of these actions was quite the clash of titans, as the New York Times likened Facebook to “a balding hipster.”

Twitter, in contrast, seems built — by coincidence, I would argue — to undercut Facebook. Third-party applications like TweetDeck and the Selective Twitter Status Facebook app allow Twitter users to update their Facebook status directly from their Twitter account. (The latter one does so by pulling only those statuses with an “#fb” tag into Facebook.)

Well, Facebook is firing back. The Next Web announced Tuesday that Facebook is undergoing yet another update to their news feed. This update, while relatively minor, almost seems to be a reverse of the last one. Instead of making the site more like Twitter, it will remove the large update box from the top of the feed and replace it with a small button on the right-hand side. You can see screenshots of the coming changes on The Next Web’s site.

Perhaps Facebook has realized that right now, it doesn’t have to feel too threatened by Twitter. This Chicago Tribune graphic compares Facebook to Twitter and the once-giant of social media, MySpace. The graph shows Twitter, which is still struggling with figuring out how to monetize its users, sitting at 20.8 million unique users in August. By contrast, Facebook claimed 92.2 million.

That makes Twitter, with its bleeding-edge “left-wing technologist” proponents, still the underdog. If you like cheering for the underdog, or if, like me, you just have an extremely developed sense of irony, you can become a fan of Twitter on Facebook.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Facebook can’t fall from grace. You never know when the underdog is going to come out on top.

Mark Zuckerberg, watch your step.