Following reports that the growth of Twitter has tapered off considerably and the fact that they are no longer considered a significant threat to Facebook, new rumours have surfaced indicating that Twitter might be all set to launch a service that could challenge Facebook’s popularity outside its own domain.
The new service will enable third-party websites to integrate features of Twitter directly and easily into their own websites.
This description of the yet-to-be-launched service sounds suspiciously similar to Facebook Connect, which was launched in 2008 and has been responsible, to an extent, for the massive growth that Facebook has continued to enjoy in the last year and a half.
According to reports from Facebook, Facebook Connect has been integrated into 80,000 different websites, resulting in Facebook receiving 60 million users who connect to Facebook through these websites every month. In fact, for many of these websites, Facebook Connect is the only means for new users to create an account and then log into it.
Facebook Connect has a lot of widgets, through which Facebook features are brought directly to these sites.
Twitter too has a good few features offered to users via the Twitter API, which allows other sites to authenticate users and pull and publish data. The process of doing so, is however not as simple as that of Facebook Connect.
With the introduction of the new system, the process of integrating Twitter will become easier for webmasters, thereby spurring the growth of Twitter further.
Update: Facebook Mimics Twitter Right Back
In a comical twist of strategy, Facebook has just launched a feature very similar to Twitter’s retweets. Users can now “retweet” updates from their friends by clicking on a ‘Share’ link in their Facebook news feed.
