The Facebookification of Twitter

Earlier today, we reported that Twitter is bringing multimedia to the stream. If you tweet a link to a video, for example, it will be embedded and play right in the Twitter stream. Twitter has “multiple partners” for today’s launch, including web video, live-streaming video, and video platform partners.

Bringing pictures and videos to the stream is one of the biggest changes Twitter has ever made. Instead of going off-site to watch your favorite YouTube video or livestream, you can stay on Twitter.com and browse multimedia all day long.

In other words, today’s changes will make Twitter feel more like Facebook.

A Convergence of Platforms

Facebook is a destination; people spend hours browsing videos, adding friends, uploading pictures, changing profile information and playing FarmVille. That’s part of the reason why it now has more than 500 million users and those users spend more time on it than any other website.

While Twitter describes itself as information network and not a social network, the company has been launching an awful lot of Facebook-esque features in recent months. The company’s “You Both Follow” feature is all about helping users build up their social graphs. Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie was part of an effort to unify the Twitter experience on multiple platforms. The same is true about the company’s Android, BlackBerry and iPhone apps.

But today’s forthcoming features are the big ones. By adding multimedia to the stream, Twitter evolves from a source of information and links to a destination website where users can simply kill time by watching all of the YouTube videos their friends are sharing. While there may not be photo albums on Twitter anytime soon, we could imagine friends checking their Twitter accounts every day (or every hour) to see what photos their friends are tweeting.

To be clear, we don’t think Twitter is trying to become Facebook — again, the service defines itself as an information network and not a social network. However, that isn’t to say the company isn’t envious of Facebook’s success and doesn’t want to become a destination website. After all, if it’s a destination, it can serve more ads.

Last year, the story was all about the “Twitterification” of Facebook. Today will be about the “Facebookification” of Twitter.

More About: facebook, multimedia, Opinion, twitter

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad