You could hardly have missed Facebook's fifth birthday. The BBC went to town on the story, technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about it from Bristol University and even Radio 5 Live Breakfast's Shelagh Fogarty got a Facebook page. (Though she, like many, couldn't grasp the ideas of total strangers being 'friends'.)
Yet I can't help feeling that the social media winner of the hour is Twitter, rather than Facebook. Rory Cellan-Jones has regularly blogged about the impact of Twitter - this post about hearing breaking news such as the New York river plane crash via the micro-blogging site is typical. He also appears to have sourced interviewees for his Facebook birthday story through Twitter. Obama's election, the Mumbai bombings and the air crash are just some of the big events that have got people sending 'tweets'.
Just one personal example. My niece Siân started following me on Twitter yesterday. "What's Twitter?" asked my wife when I told her. "I'll explain when I get home," I replied. By the time I got back, she knew all about the site from the BBC evening news.
Today, I used Twitter for real for the first time, reporting on the British parliament's Treasury select committee's grilling of high profile journalists such as the BBC's Robert Peston about the role of the media in the credit crunch. There were some great quotes, especially from former Times editor Simon Jenkins Simon Jenkins: "We've wasted stupefying amounts of money on banks. Everyone's obsessed with banks. They're bankrupt!"
There is, naturally, room for both Facebook and Twitter. But for now, the upstart is getting the attention.
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