In the last couple of weeks i heard many opinions, analysis and predictions about the future of Twitter. Does the recent events in the social networking arena will benefit or hurt the popular micro-blogging social network?

The social media industry is going wild lately because of two major players: Facebook has introduced in its F8 conference many new changes and updates including the interesting “Timeline” profile and Google+ went open to the general public after 3 months of allowing invited-only new users to register.

The debate i want to present here is if Twitter going to lose or win from the struggle between the two. Here are the two approaches:

Twitter Wins

During the last few years, Twitter had a sharp steady increase of users and Tweets, parallel to the rise of Facebook which just recently crossed the 800 million users line. If they were pure competitors, Facebook was supposed to eliminate Twitter long time ago but it didn’t. In fact, just this month Twitter celebrated 100 million active users.

If we can learn something from this is that for many social networking users, Facebook and Twitter are complementary services that can exist side by side. The continuation of this mutual growth only reinforcing the conclusion that Twitter isn’t a social network like Facebook or Google+ for that matter.

Twitter answers a simple important need of the user- It is a platform to deliver and to share short messages fast from certain individuals or organizations to a crowd that craves to hear them. Twitter is still the best comfortable platform to do it, even after the new (Copied) Subscribe button of Facebook.

If Twitter will continue to keep this advantage while renewing and innovating, users will keep seeing it as a vital complementary service to other social networks.

Twitter Loses

In the last few months Google+ and Facebook keep innovate and present new features and upgrades while gathering positive reviews and praises. At that time, Twitter didn’t introduced even one worthwhile special feature (you can’t possibly call Image Galleries innovative). Renewing and innovating are the most precious values of any technology company, especially on such a competitive arena.

Additionally, Twitter’s unique elements keeping to worn down as other social networks adding similar features- Google+ with the possibility to follow anyone with Circles and Facebook with the Subscribe button. Even if Twitter presents better efficient messaging platform, at some point it simply wouldn’t be enough to compete in such a flooded industry.

The fact that Facebook has already more than 800 million users and Google+ is growing in a massive pace, raises the question how many similar services social networks can eventually survive? It is possible that internet users will feel overwhelm with the too many social networks and they will eventually have to choose. And most likely that it will be Twitter to drop out from the race…