In a press conference today, Facebook announced some big changes:

  • no more limit on friends. Now you can have an unlimited number of people following your updates (does that sound Twitteresque to you?);
  • newsfeeds will be updated in real-time, rather than every few minutes as now (I’m feeling reeelly Twitteresque now…);
  • a new homepage design emphasizing the activity stream and including a new publishing box to facilitate photo, video and link updates (Just. Completely. Twitterlicious).

In all, these changes can be seen as Facebook taking on the “right now” aspect of Twitter very aggressively. And, given that Facebook has 175 million users compared to Twitter’s estimated 6 million, this could be a fight that Facebook wins.