Looks like Twitter is getting real competition: "Facebook Lite" is Twitter on Facebook. According to Mashable:

It is a completely stripped-down version of the Facebook platform. From what we can tell, it is almost like a Twitter (Twitter) stream: you can see your most recent status updates and the updates of your friends. There is a left-hand navigation with four main categories: Wall, Info, Friends, and Photos & Videos. It does little more than that.

So the question is, which service is growing faster? Back to Mashable, from June:

It's time for our monthly number-crunching, and the month of May definitely brought some surprising results. While YouTube (YouTube) is attracting an ever increasing audience, and Facebook (Facebook) is still growing fast, Twitter's growth has suddenly stopped, at least according to the numbers from Compete.

If that's the case, then I'd say that Facebook is the future of this kind of messaging, and Twitter is in for a long, slow period of decline - sort of the way MySpace seems to be going. That's certainly what Facebook is going for with the purchase of Friendfeed - it should become clear over the course of the next year or so how well that will work out.

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