Incredible! Its just one development after another in the search and social media landscape. First it was Google launching Caffeine, then Facebook acquring friendfeed and now Facebook has announced its new search feature, which is interestingly, real-time search. With Facebook’s new, improved search, users will be able to search the last 30 days of their News feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes.

The search results will also include content of those users who have chosen to make their content available to everyone. The search page results have finds grouped under “People”, “Pages”, “Groups” and “Web”. The latter is powered by Bing.

So, if you search for “dinner” you get to see the restaurants your friends have been to recently and how frequently. Wondering what to do over the weekend? Try searching for “weekend plan” and you will know whats hot and whats not. Search for “Harry Potter” and you can figure out what people feel about the movie.

With these recent developments, its pretty clear that Facebook considers Twitter its main competition. Despite the fact that Twitter’s user base is miniscule compared with the 250 million strong userbase of Facebook, Twitter is growing very fast. A survey by Nielsen puts Twitter’s year on year (Feb ‘08 – Feb ‘09) growth at 1382% as compared with 228% of Facebook.

The survey also indicates that the ability to tweet via mobile phones has been a driving factor in Twitter’s spectacular rise. Perhaps that is why Facebook earlier in June this year offered its users the ability to receive their friends’ status updates via sms and also the ability to reply to these updates via text messages.

Facebook knows how MySpace was edged out of its comfort zone and is aware that it needs to innovate and keep ahead of the competition. Its time for Twitter now to roll up its sleeves and not lose the momentum. As a social media marketer, I see exciting times ahead!

Tags: Social Media Marketing 2 Comments »