Does Facebook really need to be worried about how to become Twitter? I don't think so. Facebook has grown out so successfully and elegantly that it becomes a benchmark itself for others to follow. Facebook serves a certain distinguished sets of audience than that of Twitter and I think by just poking into other spaces Facebook would simply loose its stickiness and its loyal userbase.

Facebook has just announced that its users would soon be able to have their own usernames. At the first glance it seems to serve a genuine need. For instance, when we developed the Facebook SMS application, we had a hard time letting users send SMS to their Facebook friends. Had every user got a unique username, it would have been as simple as "@username <the message>". But it has its own implication as well.

One of the things I love about Facebook is that they've kept the profiles and their related data sanitized. I believe it is one of the major reasons why Facebook succeeded while other Social Networks lagged behind despite initially having a wider audience. For instance one of the things that fended me off Orkut was that every friend of mine had a funny name and I couldn't figure out who was who. I would get notifications like "Kachoo-Kooma-123 wrote in your scrapbook", "G3n.X Guy has written a testimonial" without having any idea who these guys were. Later on I would come to know that these are updated "elite" names of people sitting next to me.

On the other hand Facebook has worked hard to keep the profiles real, accurate and spam-free. This has helped even technology averse people join Facebook who have hard time figuring out how to interpret "RT @sharjeelq #facebook now offrz usernames http://tinyurl/blablabla". With proper checks to disallow funny names and rigorous privacy settings to encourage putting accurate information they've kept the site accessible to ordinary (non-1337) humans.

Clearly there is a distinction between the general users of Facebook and Twitter. While twitter users may be more progressive, it is a fact that Facebook users are fond of Facebook not because everyone is on Facebook but because what Facebook is in its current form. They are going to allow people to choose usernames for themselves and disallowing funny usernames is not possible at all. Usernames are supposed to be globally unique and when people having common names like Muhammad Hassan would not be able to get sane usernames like hassan, muhammadhassan, mhassan etc. they'd come up with creative names like mhs1pk. And when you would see "Sharjeel: Hassan, it's been long since I saw you. Where are you these days?" replaced with the culture of "sharjeelq: @mhs1pk wru?", you wouldn't want to stick much to Facebook if you are not a twitter fan or like 1337 stuff.

Introduction of usernames in Facebook is bound to make a significant change in the current userbase of Facebook. Let's see if they get benefit from the new audience!