Facebook Lite Launches
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Fact is, right now Facebook doesn't have to compete with anybody. In what they do, they're ahead of everybody else by margins that are almost baffling. Hell, the closest they come to having a competitor is Google against Facebook's Bing ads.
I think that what's happening is more simply that Facebook saw Twitter had something cool, and instead of making a set of features that were similar but slightly different in irritating ways to set itself aside, it took Twitter's ideas wholesale and credited them instantly. But that has nothing to do with Facebook Lite, which is targeting people with slower computers.
Please note I said they're competing with twitters ui, which is different from competing with twitter.
That said, I think facebook is competing with twitter's growth rate. Not in absolute figures but relative.
The fact is, twitter is growing faster than facebook did in its early years. and no one knows better than facebook how a smart team can build a business out of early momentum.
Yesterday I met, for the first time, a girl that thinks Facebook is the whole Internet. She uses it for searching and mailing... everything. Apparently there are a lot of people who do that. Facebook is enormous, and it gets missed by a lot of people like us in the tech scene, because we don't think about just how tech-illiterate most people are.