Key points as to why Facebook’s attempt to copy Twitter won’t work:

As anyone who has worked in real time systems knows, when you increase the velocity you have to decrease the volume of the content.

The other thing we suspect is that they haven’t architected their network for real time comms – it nearly broke Twitter with c 1.2m people, so we watch with bated breath to see how Facebook’s architecture will cope with 120m people.

Update – quite a few people have pointed out that the Facebook model is more similar to Friendfeed than Twitter – good point, and thats what I meant by “getting it wrong still” in that I think Friendfeed has suffered from two issues I noted above:

– Too much information on the real time feed
– Not letting a user community define/design the service systems

As the Guardian points out this is a part of yet another re-design which appears to make the site more complex (er, I think the words is ‘complicated’ as complex is the flip-side of simple, I thank you;-)

PS: Note Twitter itself has had a refresh, with integrated Trends and Search functionality.