Why Facebook Couldn’t Kill Twitter Overnight
A couple of posts on the topic of twitter vs + < / > (not sure what the correct relationship is) facebook popped up today.
Niall discusses the mutual benefits of engagement in both
Meanwhile AllFacebook has taken a break from discussing Jordan and Lily Allen and suggested that Facebook could kill twitter overnight.
Their proposal is essentially to make statuses public. Apparently this would save Facebook $500m in the stock options that were allegedly offered to buy twitter (though I also heard this was at a year old hyped valuation). They also go to length to point out that the facebook 5000 friend limit would not be a big hindrance since there are only around 500 twitter users with that many friends (ignoring the possibility that the number might grow as twitter gets bigger and becomes more mainstream).
What they also ignore is the fact that twitter and facebook are fundamentally different in how they understand the concept of friends. Facebook has never aimed to be a publishing platform and interprets the concept of friend as someone you know. Genuinely know, interact with, would recognise if you saw walking down the street etc. Twitter lets anyone follow anyone else which is what makes it a fantastic way to source news.
That’s not to say that Facebook and Twitter could not learn a lot from each other. Facebook could certainly take a lesson from how Twitter has used open APIs to essentially outsource development of tools, and there is huge room for statuses to become more than they are today (adding commenting was a big, if initially unpopular, step in that direction). Twitter could learn a lot from how Facebook manages identity (I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Facebook Connect implementation though at some point in the future) for both people and brands to live in harmony.
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