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We all know how Facebook responds to threats. A few months back, when Twitter’s traffic was spiking and there were constant stories around how Facebook was simply a neat social network with a robust photo album feature tacked on, they quickly moved to add in their real time news feature, which instantly made their home page greatly resemble Twitter’s. That was all well and good, and made me think almost immediately that real-time search on Facebook wasn’t far off.

Fast forward to this week, and it’s become a reality.  Today, Facebook has launched their real-time search feature as a part of their search page, and have gone and hit Twitter right in their wheel house.  The feature will essentially let you search for terms, phrases, strings, whatever from not only your friends’ status updates, but from the entire Facebook universe as well:

Cool, eh?  I’m not Facebook friends with any of these people, so this is obviously a fairly revolutionary step in the evolution of Facebook’s platform.  This also follows the huge announcement that cam yesterday that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, the real-time feed aggregator service whose founders are mostly Google folks such as Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and the infamous Google corporate slogan “Don’t be Evil”.  It certainly seems like the FriendFeed acquisition was driven by the fact that FriendFeed is made up of people who have amazing product development talent, front end UX design mostly, such as Buchheit and Kevin Fox. But other than bringing in the amazing talent that FriendFeed boasts, it’s interesting to note that the features of FriendFeed don’t really add anything revolutionary to Facebook offering at this time. The future of the service will be interesting to watch though, here’s Buchheit at Startup School 2008:

More interesting however, is Facebook’s main competition in the social media space today – Twitter and how they are going to respond to not only the FriendFeed acquisition, but perhaps more paramount, the real-time search feature. Around a month ago, TechCrunch posted certain securely sensitive internal documents that had been stolen from Twitter from a hacker. One of these documents that got posted was titled ‘How Facebook can kill us” – have a look:

Obviously, the first item on the list is ‘Real-time search’, so we know that this move has Twitter a bit nervous. Interestingly, this feature add on has also been step toward openness on the part of Facebook, something that could eventually lead them to becoming truly open, and implement item two on this list – ‘Opt-in to make status public’. Another list item here that is catching on in a hurry is ‘Get all Twitter clients to work with Facebook’ – note the integration of Facebook into TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

But in the end, will any of it matter? Facebook’s moves to kill Twitter recently have been lauded by the press and are seemingly good moves, but they don’t yet have anything to do with the core model of Facebook’s product offering – friend connections – the idea of ‘opt-in’ connections between people. Sure, real-time search helps in regards to competing with Twitter search, but but the two services stand diametrically apart in terms of functionality. In any case, the playing field has been leveled a bit and there now are 2 clear winners in the social media space – Facebook and Twitter.