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Link 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

  1. 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.
  2. When you write on somebody’s wall, it is roughly equivalent to a twitter direct message.
  3. When you comment on somebody’s facetweet, it is equivalent to an @reply on twitter.
  4. 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.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 3:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 7 Comments

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    Andrew, my first thought as well. The wall message is more like an @reply, though, in that if Person A writes on Person B's wall, that message appears in my feed if and only if I'm friends with both Person A and Person B, exactly like in Twitter. On the other hand, I don't think twitter has an exact counterpart to the Facebook 'comment', as there is no way I can send anything that can be seen by all of your twitter followers.

    Also, I'm not quite sure there is a standard twitter user, yet. My sister's husband has about 1000 followers in a loose social group around Windows programming. More serious/work-related than facebook, but not impersonal.
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    • v
    you make a good point. i think twitter will evolve much like blogging. most blogs have very few readers, and most twitterers will have a handful of followers. in the world of blogging, there are personal blogs, but few of them have any significant number of readers. the big blogs cover topics interesting to a larger, if still niche-focused, audience. Twitter will evolve the same way. A long tail of personal twitterers and small minority of twitterers who serve the mass majority. Either way, I think twitter looks much more like a blogging phenom then what drives facebook, which is about staying in touch personally with people you know and like.
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    • v
    Reality is that facebook makes no money and has not been able to figure out how to do so. Advertising revenues are not what they once were (and are unlikely to rise much in the future), and the company is chewing up capital at an extraordinary, unsustainable rate.

    So for facebook, this is about momentum and justification. Both facebook and twitter are nuts because they have free models. Don't follow the tech; follow the money.

    Didn't we learn anything during the dotcom bust?
    • ^
    • v
    google had no business model early on (well, they thought it was going to be selling search appliances to companies), just consumer adoption. youtube was in a similar situation. seems unlikely to me that facebook can't parlay the amount of user attention they have into a profitable business.I dont see a lot of proxies for companies that have the the level of adoption that facebook has that did not find a model, provided their costs were not crazy. twitter has a very small team (under 50). they will do fine.
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    • v
    I agree with you, Twitter caught a HUGE break on the news because of simplicity and the catchy name. Kids love to say less and using the SMS upload to a wide audience appeals to them as well as politicians (who in my mind are still teenagers). To see the news anchors also Twitter is just insane, they are a mindless set of talkers desiring a public.

    Facebook is more robust and has the security controls I desire in a social networking system. Having FAcebook blink and chase Twitter was a bad idea and looks like Twitter envy. My family and friends are not pleased with the changes in Facebook and I predict that they will follow Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL which I used if they don't watch out for their loyal customers. Twitter will not be where I go, but I detect a small opening for a new web company to emerge.
    • ^
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    Capital One expects cumulative losses on Chevy Chase’s $11.8 billion loan portfolio to be $1.75 billion, according to a person familiar with the situation. Chevy Chase has $4.15 billion in adjustable-rate mortgages known as option ARMs that have come under particular strain www.chase.com during the housing meltdown. The bank’s profits fell 69% in the third quarter, to $5.9 million.A company that made its name as a marketer of no-fee credit cards, Capital One became a regional bank in 2005 and 2006 through acquisitions of Hibernia Corp. and North Fork Bancorp. It now has 739 branches. Chevy Chase will give the company a combined 983 branches.
    • ^
    • v
    FAcebook and Twitter is very different, I prefer Facebook because it caters photos and videos. If your a photographer you can showcase you shoots in there, unlike Twitter.
 

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