By Robert D. Hof

Facebook

In A Class Of Their Own

The onetime college dating tool early this year passed News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace as the top social network in the U.S. Recently, it has noticed Twitter's rise and tried to counter the upstart with a redesign that puts its long-popular status updates from its members to their friends front and center. Facebook no doubt will continue to make its services more real-time, partly by making more data available to outside application developers, but it remains to be seen how central that aspect will be next to its mission to be people's main social utility.