Facebook has been evolving from a network of personal profiles to a stream of real time interactions for a while now. The original news feed will be three years old this September; Facebook itself will be about five and a half. So it’s recently become the case that Facebook has spent most of its life growing up to be something at least as much like Twitter (new and exciting) as MySpace (old world, but for a long time what Facebook was most frequently compared to).

The most high profile event in the flurry of recent Facebook-goes-realtime activity was its purchase of the online social activity aggregator FriendFeed last week. Predictably, the social media chattering class reacted with a whole lot of discussion and speculation. How will this change Facebook? What will happen to FriendFeed’s users? What sort of broader trends does this represent? What does it mean for the social Web as a whole? And from MediaPost’s Social Media Insider, Did Twitter Just Get Thrown Under a Bus?

So, as you may have read on Monday, Facebook made two moves that are direct assaults on the emergence of Twitter as the current social media darling. [...]

• First, Facebook acquired Friendfeed, which, as I said in one of my other writing venues, effectively puts Facebook atop the social mediasphere, since Friendfeed aggregates almost 60 social media services [...]
• Second, the company unleashed its real-time search function onto the world, allowing people to not only search all of Facebook for certain terms (for fun, the first keyword I searched was Twitter), but also search their own stream of friends, including photos, status updates and so forth over the last 30 days. [...]

[...] And then, while searching for something entirely different this morning, I came across the news of Facebook Lite, which Facebook is starting to beta test. [...] Facebook Lite looks and sounds lot like Twitter. As Mashable describes it: “From what we can tell, it is almost like a Twitter stream: you can see your most recent status updates and the updates of your friends. There is a left-hand navigation with four main categories: Wall, Info, Friends, and Photos & Videos. It does little more than that.”

Yep. That was Twitter just getting thrown under a bus.

[ed: Apologies for all the ellipses but I wanted to get the whole argument in; I'm pretty sure it's not a distortion.]

First, just because you can aggregate content doesn’t mean you are “atop the social mediasphere”. There are a whole lot of services that can do that and in a world where most everything is available as an RSS feed it’s really not that hard to manage.

Second, just because something looks like Twitter doesn’t make it the same as Twitter. There are plenty of Twitter clones out there but they don’t get their own free advertising on Oprah.

But more importantly, only the social media elite care about FriendFeed or what it does. You have to either be a pretty avid early adopter of social media or a fairly close watcher of social media trends to even know what it is.

The Huffington Post, on the other hand, is arguably the single most successful exclusively Web-based content portal. Why compare the two? Because Facebook also just linked up with HuffPo, and they didn’t even have to pay for it:

In an unusually robust collaboration using Facebook Connect, the Huffington Post is launching a feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News,” which lets readers create a personalized social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post itself.

While the Huffington Post had already been using Facebook Connect since January–which allows readers of the site to log in using their Facebook identity to interact, which is mostly used to leave comments–this use essentially takes Facebook Connect and puts it on steroids.

“We are looking at HuffPost Social News like a ‘digital water cooler,’ because we see news going in that direction,” said Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief and co-founder Arianna Huffington, in an interview with me this weekend. “We did this because we are interested in real identities having real conversations about news.” [...]

Such a move is an interesting one for Facebook too, since it is getting unusual prominence and much deeper integration on a popular news Web site, well beyond how other sites are using Facebook Connect.

If it works, HuffPost Social News will give it even more content flowing into its service, a direction that was also underscored by Facebook’s recent $50 million purchase of FriendFeed, the online content-sharing site.

Goosing interactivity and engagement is a big aim for Facebook and also lots of news sites, such as the Huffington Post.

While there are about 1.7 million comments on the site monthly, for example, if users sign up for HuffPost Social News at large rates, that could expand a lot. (AllThingsD)

Now I might be proven wrong about this over the course of the rest of the week, but I’m willing to bet that this partnership isn’t going to get nearly as much attention as the FriendFeed acquisition. That’s silly for a very simple reason:

The Huffington Post gets somewhere around seven times as many unique visitors each month as FriendFeed does. Alexa ranks HuffPo as the 327th most popular site on the Web and FriendFeed as the 853rd (for additional perspective note that Facebook is number 4). Perhaps more surprising is that HuffPo is growing faster than FriendFeed too (+129% vs +78% for the past year).

But the critical point here is that FriendFeed really is just a social medium. Without the material generated by its users there wouldn’t be anything there. The Huffington Post actually produces content, and not just the original posts themselves. I think the most important observation from the AllThingsD report above is the potential this has to grow the already large volume of comments (which really need to be considered a content asset on in their own right at this point) left on the Huffington Post. Keep in mind that Facebook Connect means that those comments can stream back to Facebook for incorporation into users’ news feeds.

That is huge. It could help transform the news feed into an actual discussion of content to which everyone has access rather than a cacophony of automatically reported social networking activity that’s often really only relevant to a few people at most. That starts to make Facebook’s real time functionality actually more comparable to Twitter, rather than just looking like it.

FriendFeed and search and a ‘lite’ version of the site are about the medium or the interface; they are aspects of the technology that makes interaction possible. People use Facebook and Twitter because of the other people using those services; people visit the Huffington Post for the content it delivers. Neither Facebook nor Twitter are what they are today primarily because of technology. It’s more a matter of being at the right place at the right time and the initial user bases those services grew out of—in other words the “social” in social media.

Within the little bubble universe of people who worry about these things it’s easy to lose sight of that because of the excitement about new ideas and technologies.