Is Facebook all about videos and mobile?

Facebook and Twitter are like Android and iOS of the social world. Over the years, both have been borrowing the best from each other. Remember how Twitter built a Facebook-like profile page design and Facebook on the other hand Facebook borrowed features like Mentions and Follow. But lately, the shift in pattern for Facebook seems to be heading elsewhere. Today, Facebook launched its new feature – video profiles. Yes, a cool 7-second loop of video that will play instead of a static profile photo. Well, that reminds us of the 6-second Vine loop video that Twitter acquired years ago. This isn’t the first time that Facebook has borrowed the video features. If you remember, Facebook had also added Vine-like feature to its owned Instagram.  In the recent months, Facebook has been all about videos. We saw video autoplay being rolled out and now a video profile picture instead of a static one. It was only this year that Facebook opened its doors for GIFs. This marks a significant change for Facebook as the social site has avoided supporting GIFs, claiming it would make the News Feed ‘too chaotic’. In fact, many users were surprised when Facebook didn’t support the format even after Twitter did it last year. Earlier this year, Facebook had talked about talked soaring video consumption. In April, the social network was boasting of more than four billion video views on a day. Now, that’s a big number and its possibly video ads that the company is aiming at to grow further. In the past, we’ve seen monetising has always been a problem for social sites. For instance, Twitter has been struggling for years to generate revenue.  There could be many reasons to this, but what we need to understand is a social platform has to evolve. Facebook doesn’t really want the fate as MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, or many others that have failed. Facebook understands this and that’s why the company is gaining momentum towards video content. The social site has learnt to grow and so it is not surprising to see Twitter follow the Facebook path now. Twitter  had previously pulled out the 140-character limit from Direct Messages and now there are rumours about how the company plans to do the same when it comes to tweets. What actually differentiates Twitter from other social networks is its 140-character limit that forces people to present their ideas in limited words. With the company planning to take that away, there wouldn’t be anything that will differentiate it from its arch-rival Facebook. This will also mean opening the gates to customer service and marketing to a larger extend that has never been seen before. So, while **Twitter is simply following the Facebook** path, we wonder where Facebook is heading?