Facebook is now offering its users the ability to receive their friends’ status updates via text message on their phones. If you click on the "subscribe via SMS" link below your friends’ profile pics, you get their latest updates this way.

Sound familiar? That’s probably because you can do basically the same thing with Twitter. This is just the latest example of Facebook acknowleging (without coming right out and saying it) that they view Twitter as a major competitor. If this wasn’t evident enough upon the last major redesign change, which switched to a Twitter-esque real-time status feed, it’s even more clear now.

Facebook is certainly the dominant force in social networking currently, but there was a time when you might’ve said the same about MySpace. Twitter continues to grow rapidly (despite retention issues). It’s not really showing any signs of slowing yet, and Facebook is well aware of this.

The option to subscribe to Friend updates via SMS is a smart move on Facebook’s part. It has been, after all, a big contributor to the success of Twitter in the first place. As more and more people are using their mobile devices to use their social networks. It’s simply just a logical step, and frankly an overdue one.

It is a good thing they did it on a friend-by-friend basis, because I can’t see too many people being incredibly stoked about the chance to receive every update in their news feed via text message. It would be going non-stop.

When you receive a text message of a status update. You can simply reply to the message to leave a comment on the update. And in addition to receiving updates from your friends, you can do the same with Facebook Pages.

"If you already have Facebook Mobile activated for your phone or device, then you will begin receiving the text message updates after confirming your subscription," notes Phil on the Facebook blog. "If you haven’t yet set up Facebook Mobile, you will be taken through a series of steps to activate it before receiving text messages."

If you decide you don’t want to receive text messages from anyone you subscribed to, you can unsubscribe by:

- replying directly from your phone with "unsubscribe"

- returning to the friend’s profile (or Page) and clicking the "unsubscribe from SMS updates" link

- Editing your mobile texts settings from the Facebook mobile app.

The feature is available in 18 countries right now, but Facebook says it is expanding it around the world. The service is free on Facebooks’s end, but obviously standard fees from your provider will still stand. In other mobile social news, Google released a mobile app for Orkut.

Research from Nielsen shows that time spent on Facebook is up 700% from a year ago (that’s April ‘08 to April ‘09). Meanwhile, MySpace has experienced -31% year-over-year growth.

That doesn’t look great for MySpace, but don’t count out the still popular social network. MySpace is still beating Facebook when it comes to video. In April, Myspace visitors spent 384 million minutes watching video (an average of 38.8 minutes per viewer), while Facebook visitors spent only 113.5 million minutes watching video (an average of 11.2 minutes per video viewer).

"We have seen some very exciting growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space. The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is growing, or a how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers," said Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights, Nielsen Online. "Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment’s notice."

Gibs makes a very valid point. Look at the backlash that Facebook got from its users after it implemented the infamous redesign. Granted, the redesign is still in effect, and the site is still growing, but if something else comes along that people like better, you never know what can happen. In fact, this is why I find Google’s rise as a social network all the more intriguing.

But for now, Facebooks is obviously the dominant force to be reckoned with. It does have a problem with user retention from the over-55 crowd. Justin Smith suggests the following four reasons for this:

1. Facebook currently provides less value to this age group because most of their friends are still using other communication tools like email.

2. The real-time Facebook stream is too new and overwhelming for people less familiar with social networks to understand.

3. Seasonality of family communication.

4. Facebook was just a one-time thing.

Smith goes into detail to back up each of these reasons in an interesting post here. He also looks at audience growth in the last two 60-day periods, providing the following graph:

As you can see there has been substantial growth among the college age crowd. A while back, a study was released, indicating that Facebook was actually having a negative impact on the grades of students. The study looked at Ohio State University specifically.

The Wall Street journal is showing a little more to this story now, citing newer studies that actually show Facebook use as being more common with students who get higher grades. Like anything else, it’s how you use it, and not if you use it.

What do you make of the Facebook growth data? How about Facebook’s correlation with grades? Talk about it.

Google has been accused of stealing the thunder of others on numerous occasions. The most recent example cited in a post from the VP of Marketing for Blekko is Google’s structured data product, which WebProNews covered here.

Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a response/defense to the notion that Google is out to steal any thunder. He takes each point made by Mike Markson, the Blekko guy, and counters it with why Google was not "stealing any thunder." His response to that initial point is this:

"I wasn’t familiar with this one, so I dropped an email to Ola Rosling, the Googler employee who wrote the blog post announcement," says Cutts. "It turns out that there’s a straightforward reason for the timing: the blog post was planned for a different day, but an early/unexpected baby arrival resulted in this blog post being rescheduled."

Another instance mentioned by Markson was when Cuil announced that it indexed 120 billion documents, and 3 days before it Google announced it had a trillion. Cutts says Google passed a trillion a month before.

There are several other items mentioned, but Cutts counters each one, though Markson is not entirely convinced by all of them as an update to his original post indicates.

Is Google out to steal the thunder of others? Maybe, maybe not. Does Google have the right to do so? I don’t see why not. If potential competitors are announcing things that can persuade people that they are better than Google in some way, why would Google not want people to know that they are as good/better in that particular area when applicable? Wouldn’t you do the same for your business? Yes, Google is a very dominant force, but while they generally don’t turn out to be, how many of these things have been labeled "Google-killers?" Is Google supposed to roll over to the competition?  What do you think?

Google co-founder Larry Page gave a quite inspirational speech at the University of Michigan the other day, and the Google Press Center found it so great, they decided to release it to the public.

The entire thing is transcribed here (and the video’s below), but to sum it up, it’s about following your dreams to make a difference. At least that’s what I got out of it.

In part of the speech, he talked about starting Google, and the excitement and vulnerability he felt at the same time. Many have likely heard the story before, but it’s always fun to look at the humble origins of the most dominant force on the web. Page mentioned having a dream back in his college days:

When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

A little more on that excitement and vulnerability:

Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. How can that not get you excited? But we almost didn’t start Google because my co-founder Sergey and I were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program. You are probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm! That is about how we felt after we maxed out three credit cards buying hard disks off the back of a truck. That was the first hardware for Google. Parents and friends: more credit cards always help. What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!

Page encouraged his audience of college students to get crazy and ambitions at this particular time in their lives because they never know when opportunities will be taken away from them. He then went on to talk about his late father and the quest to eliminate polio.

There are always going to be people accusing Google of not living up to the "do no evil" mantra that the company is famously known for, but reading Page’s speech certainly paints a picture of good intentions. That’s probably one reason why Google deemed the speech press release-worthy. If you’ve got a few minutes, it’s worth a read (or view).

Last month, reports came out indicating that Google might have to make YouTube users in South Korea confirm their real identities if they wanted to upload or comment on content. There is a law in that country that went into effect on April 1st, that requires users to provide their ID numbers and would require Google to turn over information to the South Korean government when asked.

It was looking like Google was going to comply. A Google spokesperson was quoted as saying, "Google Korea has … always (taken) the stance that Google respects local law/regulation but at the same time we continue trying to promote freedom of speech on the Internet."

Ultimately, Google has decided to block uploads and comments to Korean YouTube users. As a workaround, they are suggesting users change their preferences to a different country’s version of YouTube if they want to participate in the community.

"We concluded in the end that it is impossible to provide benefits to internet users while observing this country’s law because the law does not fall in line with Google’s principles," Rachel Whetstone, Google’s vice president of Global Communications & Public Affairs is quoted as saying.

Many would’ve considered Google’s requiring of users to submit their IDs evil had they gone through with it. Some seem to think they would’ve gone through with it anyway had YouTube been a more dominant force in the country.

"That’s because in Korea, Google has a much smaller presence than its domestic counterparts like www.naver.com and www.daum.net," says Read Write Web’s Sarah Perez. "Let’s see how the company behaves in countries where they have a much larger market share."

Either way, Google is sure to get a lot less flack for this than if they had gone the other way. Privacy advocates are often focused on Google, and they would’ve had a field day with this one.