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Facebook’s new scheme to not stop existing is to try to convince users that they want to give each other ‘credits’ for especially good updates (at the tune of $1/100 credits). The only things you can use these credits for is to give them to another user or buy a virtual gift and give that to another user. So by doing almost nothing Facebook hopes to rake in some of your cash. I’m sure you can see why this won’t work, why cant they? This is just the latest in a long series of events that shows Facebook is on the way out and is well aware of this fact. From multiple UI changes to a fairly constant firing of CFOs, there is no shortage of signposts pointing down for Facebook. It’s death certainly won’t happen soon, their userbase is still growing nearly exponentially and they’re still one of the best social networking sites there is, but its only a matter of time until the end.

Facebook seems to have gotten the idea that Twitter is its main competition. As of the most recent homepage redesign Facebook essentially functions as a Twitter clone with a beefed up profile page. The concepts of a status update and a wall post have merged together to approximate Twitter’s tweet and has pushed everything else to a small bar on the side. Which honestly is not terrible a design, except for the fact that Facebook is not the same kind of thing as Twitter. And it probably never will be. They aren’t even competing. I use both quite frequently, but for completely different purposes. To the best of my knowledge that’s pretty common among users of both. Even as similar as a tweet is to the new version of a status update, I rarely if ever have the same content for both. So even if Facebook perfectly clones every feature of Twitter, people won’t use it as the same way use Twitter, simply because that’s not what Facebook is to them. Sadly Facebook is breaking itself to give its users what it thinks they want. Here’s a heads up Facebook: Sure we want all that stuff, but not from you, and certainly not at the cost of the features we knew, liked, and actually wanted.