There’s a quiet war raging in the world of social networking. While millions of users are happily super poking, thumbing up and tweeting each other, the rules of the game are being rewritten as sites like Facebook and Twitter vie to define the next revolution.

On the 24th of June the battleship Facebook launched a long awaited missile at its smaller, nimbler foe, the SS Twitter. This missile was the news that Facebook are making a large chunk of content posted to their site - including status messages, photos and videos – accessible to the general public.

Now before you panic and rush off to delete all those pictures of you doing body shots at last month’s pimps ‘n ho’s party, you should know two things.
Firstly this new feature only applies to people who already had their privacy settings turned off – in other words people who were already showing the world everything.

Secondly this probably won’t be a retroactive change. In other words all the stuff you posted previously will be exempt – even if your profile was already set to “buck naked”.

But why would they bother doing this? Surely Facebook is all about privacy? That’s just the thing - Twitter has proven that tens of millions of people would prefer to broadcast their thoughts publically than update their private Facebook status.

They may not admit it but this scares Facebook. You might check your Facebook profile once a week, but you’ll check Twitter several times daily. By opening their streams up to the public they are hoping to mimic this model.

This is the first front in the war – the battle between public networks and private ones. As cosy as private networks are, they are proving less active and vibrant than public ones. Facebook is fast becoming a fancy email and photo sharing system, rather than the beating heart of the web that they were just two years ago.

But this is more than just a defensive move for Facebook. Rumours are circulating that they are working on a “sentiment engine” that would let researchers gauge public opinion on any topic simply by “listening” to what people are saying in their conversations on the system.

And they wouldn’t need to trawl through billions of individual conversations – the tool would give them an instant overview of sentiments in much the same way that a Google search gives you an overview of content available on the web.

Which brings us to the second front in the war: “real-time” versus “asynchronous”. When you post an update on Twitter it appears immediately (in “real-time”) and you often get instant feedback from your peers. Things like email are asynchronous – you fire it off and the recipient reads it much later.

Content, search, shopping and blogging are all asynchronous – they don’t need two people to be online at the same time for them to work. Chat has always been the bastion of real-time, but was always limited by practical concerns like privacy.

At the moment Twitter is winning the battle for real-time. If you need to know the hottest topics around the world, Twitter can give them to you instantly. This has made even giants like Google and Apple sit up and take notice.

But Facebook can’t be underestimated. For all its pluck, Twitter has a fraction of Facebook’s enormous global audience and almost none of the kind of demographic information that makes marketers love Facebook so dearly. If Facebook can unlock even 1% of their real-time potential they could squash revenue-less Twitter flat.

Whoever wins the war, one thing is certain: the web is finally coming into its own. Why wait for news to be published when you can instantly feel the pulse of the world whenever you need to? The only question for me remains: how are we going to process all this information? Brain implants anyone?

also published in News24