Facebook explodes, chases company 1/100th its size
OMG. Facebook just tossed their entire status/wall-to-wall semantics trying to “catch-up” with twitter. Wow. Not sure how this is going to work out for them.
Facebook used to ask “what are you doing right now.” and then help me out with “Andrew is …”
This was a pretty easy question to answer and it then became your topline status. This notion of having a status comes from the AOL world. It is pretty universal and popular.
Twitter started as way to have multicast conversations with people you care about. But twitter has emerged into microblogging service where you mostly follow interesting people whom you do not know personally.
People who use twitter to post personal status (“i am on a bus.”) are not very interesting. (The exception to that rule is that if you are a celebrity, anything you post is considered interesting, the more personal the better.).
On facebook, the only people connected to me are folks that I have some sort of relationship with. Hence, facebook status served a different purpose than twitter.
Now facebook is trying to twitterize their feed. Changes they made
- They ask “what is on your mind.” Twitter asks “what are you doing,” which is actually closer to what facebook used to ask, but the popular folks on twitter don’t answer that question anyway.
- When you write on somebody’s wall, it is roughly equivalent to a twitter direct message.
- When you comment on somebody’s facetweet, it is equivalent to an @reply on twitter.
- Next to each facetweet is your avatar, just like on …twitter!
I am not sure how this will work out for facebook. With even more activity produced per minute, the important stuff from my less verbose friends quickly gets pushed down to the bottom. But I have to say, it is more conversational.
Still, facebook is not twitter because on twitter, I follow strangers. Hence, it is not clear that they needed to be so similar.
How often do you see a company with 150MM unique users chase a company with under 10MM unique users? Its bold and strange all at the same time. It will be fun to watch how this works out. Facebook says they tested this stuff. Maybe they did, but I lost interest in internet bulletin boards a long time ago, and this facebook seems to be becoming some crazy cross between IRC and AIM. You just can’t make this stuff up.
I also find it interesting that often the most successful companies can’t help but morph in unnatural directions once they are big. Ebay and Skype? Crazy right. Well facebook and twitter may also be nuts.
