Facebook's Zuckerberg: Copy to Win

It is now well-established that social network Facebook was built up from the idea (if not the actual code) of HarvardConnect, which later became ConnectU. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was sued for stealing the idea of Facebook from HarvardConnect, which he briefly worked on as a student.

So when Facebook announced yesterday that interface changes would soon be rolled out, which will turn the user's page into a real-time update feed of his friends' activities, many assumed this move was to replicate some of the more popular functionality of microblogging service Twitter, and remove some of the luster from that popularity. This idea is largely due to repeated rumors of an attempted Twitter buyout by Facebook.

But Facebook has been offering users a self-status update field -- "What are you doing right now?" which is essentially what Twitter does now -- long before Twitter came into fruition.

In fact, Facebook's coming redesign actually wedges it into the vein of Tumblelog, a stream-of-consciousness blogging style that has been increasing in popularity for the last five years. Blogger Jason Kottke notably said Tumblelogging is the blog equivalent of Ruby on Rails: quick and dirty with an emphasis on fast prototyping.

Like Tumblelogging service Tumblr, Facebook's interface will be a blank field for text updates that includes buttons for inserting Links, Photos, Video, and other items that can be blogged. All updates appear in (mostly) real time, instead of every ten minutes like the site's current refresh time. Real-time feeds can be filtered by friend network, geographic network, and other categories.

Facebook's changes will go into effect next week.