I’ve now posted multiple times about Facebook’s new emphasis on their ‘Status’ feature – and how it appears the latest changes are taking aim directly at Twitter. Well tonight on their own blog, Facebook more or less outlined the same thing. Of course they don’t mention Twitter, but here are the “shiny and new” features they do mention:

• Your friends’ three most recent updates on the home page
• A brand new page to see all your friends’ updates at once
• An RSS feed to put your friends’ updates in your reader of choice
• The ability to subscribe to a friend’s updates via SMS
• The ability to easily update status from your phone by sending an SMS to Facebook starting with the “@” character

Just about all of these things sound very familiar… The last two (subscribe to a friend’s status updates via SMS and update yours via SMS) are the most interesting as these are the main functionalities that brought about Twitter’s explosion at SXSW this year.

How strange that Facebook would make a blog post just to outline Twitter’s functionality…oh wait, I mean their ‘Status’ functionality.

At least they changed that silly ‘I am’ -> ‘MG is’ switch-a-roo.

[UPDATE]: The New York Times just ran a piece on Twitter – the buzz is getting more mainstream.