Twitter is The New Facebook
Posted by Sebastien on the 2008/03/06 at 03:50
in ComScore, FaceBook, Micro-blogging, Social networks, Twitter -
Back in December, in “A look back at 2007“, I wrote that I believed early adopters’ interest in Facebook had peaked and had even started to decline. Recently, the blogosphere echoed that sentiment with news of “Facebook fatigue”.
- In January, The Register started by saying “Whisper it, but numbers from web analytics outfit comScore have confirmed what the chatter in bars and cafes has been saying for months - people are, just, well, bored of social networks.” About Facebook, they added that “behaviour seems much the same; join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted.”
- A few weeks later, Techcrunch also looking at ComScore data said “The number of people who visit Facebook has been leveling off over the past few months in the U.S., and even dipped by about 800,000 individuals in January. (…) Maybe all that friend spam has something to do with the decline. Will the Facebook fatigue get worse, or is this just a temporary dip?”
- Adding his grain of salt, Rory Cellan-Jones from the BBC added: “The general feeling is that the kids, with their minute attention spans, have already tired of the social networking site and moved on to something more hip and happening. I think the opposite is true - that Facebook’s new wave of older users have decided it is just not worth the bother and are now leaving it to the kids.”
I agree. My personal experience with Facebook is that its relative utility for me has decreased drastically in the last few months. There used to be a lot of “friend” activities in my newsfeed and in my status updates. Even though I have more than 550 “friends”, I suspect that only 20% at most are using it regularly. As I wrote two months ago, Facebook is just a game. Industry pundits are looking for utility and, for a while, it certainly felt like Facebook was IT. But not anymore. Has something replaced it? Yes. Today, I’d like to say it’s Twitter. It’s all anecdotal, mind you, based on my brain filtering a massive quantity of articles and blog posts I read every day. You’ll have to trust me on this. 
Should you still care about Facebook? A resounding YES! As Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures Partners says “The digerati, with their Outlook address books and social network friends lists in the 1000s, bloated by people they met at conferences several years ago, are edge use cases. Their experience is atypical. Normal users of social networks use Facebook apps in the same way that middle America forwards emails to one another.” Those millions of users are not going away and Facebook is still a formidable platform to broadcast your brand and content.
But back to Twitter, what is it? Twitter is a micro-blogging application that allows you to send text messages of up to 140 characters. It really exploded on the Web scene last year at the SXSW Interactive Festival. People started using it in drove but I wasn’t sure what to do with it (and I’m sure I was not alone), until Facebook taught us how to “Twitter” through its “Status Update” feature. Along with the newsfeed, it is one of Facebook’s killer apps but I think most people found it too limited in functionality. It was really just about broadcasting information.
Twitter is much more. It can be a:
- Broadcast tool. Send information to your network of “followers”, your latest blog post, a breaking news, a summary of a conference you’re attending, the boring stuff of your daily life, etc. Best of all, you can share clickable URLs.
- Conversation tool. Using the @ symbol followed by the Twitter alias, you can ask questions, join an existing conversation and contribute to the community.
- Early warning system. Breaking news seem to pop-up on Twitter much more quickly than in other media. I’ve learned about different breaking news more quickly in the last few weeks using it. Some people have already created specific channels for breaking news, which you can start following. See BreakingNewsOn or the Techmeme firehose.
- Proxy conferences. Recently, I was able to follow updates from the TED, a very coveted invite-only conference. You could obviously follow it in real time, but through structured data standards called hashtags, you can also see what people have been reporting about TED here.
- Subscribe to people. Where else can you follow updates and insights from industry luminaries like Pierre Omidyar (eBay’s founder) or Paul Kedrosky (famed Canadian VC)? There are hundreds of interesting people to follow in Twitter.
Howard Rheingold of SmartMobs fame offers even more reasons to like Twitter.
Twitter obviously has flaws:
- It hasn’t announced a business model yet and people are afraid its introduction will break the utility.
- It suffers from many well-documented technical interruptions.
- You can’t segment your “tribes”, allowing you to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, as you start following more people.
- Most of my (and possibly your) contacts are not on Twitter yet, which reduces its intrinsic value.
- It’s a huge time-waster, looking at the conversation feed and making sense of it all.
But even with these flaws, I expect Twitter to really catch fire in the next few months, with more people joining, trying it out, finding utility and transforming it into a vibrant worlwide conversation-based community. Even my Praized Media partner, Sylvain, is organizing the first TwittYul, an informal event for Montreal Twitter users and fans You could read about it first … on Twitter. BTW, if you join and want to follow my “tweets”, I can be found here: http://twitter.com/Praized
March 6th, 2008 at 03:58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZzP_69ZTFk
March 6th, 2008 at 04:17
Sebastien,
My explore with Facebook and Twitter is very similar to your’s. What I wonder is whether Twitter will go through the same cycle as Facebook as people get over the novelty, and look for their next digital fix.
March 6th, 2008 at 05:14
I think point #5 is the most important - I can’t even look at it because there is just so much noise there.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:56
Like AhmedP said, point #5 is the big thing making me sometimes upset about Twitter. Its a good tool, but it’ll be a great one if they can fix that, by more tweaking of the info you get.
March 7th, 2008 at 09:43
The big advantage that Twitter has over Facebook is that you can control the signal to noise ratio. I only follow about 10 people at a time and will quickly unsubscribe from those who insist on telling what they had for lunch, what their cat is doing or what they just read on Digg.
By contrast, Facebook insists on bombarding me with requests to throw zombies at pirates or updates on who is playing Scrabulous.
I still use FB to keep in touch with my friends outside the industry, but Twitter feeds me the latest buzz.
March 7th, 2008 at 01:54
Exact same feelings, Sebastien. Facebook is too much effort, and I am incredibly uninterested in the widgets that my friends want me to add.
I find myself getting addicted to Twitter in short bursts. But I find, like you mention in flaw #3, that I want to listen or speak to different groups — from talking about social media theory, to debates on who is going to be voted off american idol. I’ve considered having two identities on there, but that just overly complicates life.
March 8th, 2008 at 07:02
I have recently become very interested in “social media” since, as a marketing professor, I believe this truly is the future of marketing. And please let me be clear that by that I mean “marketing” and not simply “advertising.” The ability to listen to conversations among consumers and engage consumers in conversations should/could radically transform the ways companies are able to cater to customers. This assumes, of course, that as marketers we don’t go for the “get rich quick” approach. I already dread the day that I see some 30 minute infomercial on “Using Social Media For Fun and Profit!!” I’m sure someone like Don Lepre is right now sitting in their tiny one bedroom apartment (if you don’t get that reference you have no idea what you have missed! :-)) figuring out a way to take advantage of other people via social media.
However, my concern is exactly that voiced above about Facebook. For example, I personally have never seen the utility of either Facebook or MySpace and wonder if Twitter may not have the same sort of lifecycle. The bottom line is how is any of this all that significantly different from e-mail or web boards? I do realize that Twitter is easier to use across more hardware platforms (e.g., computer, cell phone, PDA, etc) but isn’t it still, at its most fundamental level, communicating with another person or persons? I’ve been doing that since the early 1990s on first various newsgroups, then e-mail lists and now web boards. The question is why would the group of us who subscribe to a e-mail list devoted to our beloved University of Kentucky Wildcat basketball team would want/need to move that to something like Twitter?
March 8th, 2008 at 07:28
Sebastien, I think you are 100 % right. I feel like Facebook is even worst than what you mean. I love what Kathryn saied. “Facebook …. and I am incredibly uninterested in the widgets that my friends want me to add” That is what happens to me.
March 8th, 2008 at 12:28
[…] read more | digg story […]
March 8th, 2008 at 12:56
I think that a new social messaging platform solves a lot of the issues that you’ve found with Twitter. Pownce lets you message to individuals or groups and has an integrated business model.
Try it out. I like it a lot. http://www.pownce.com
March 8th, 2008 at 12:59
Agreed - if only from my own usage patterns. Twitter is so easy and convenient to use a monkey could do it. The time commitment is practically nil. Facebook feels more and more like a chore, and at worst it’s spammy.
March 8th, 2008 at 12:59
It does seem that Twitter is where Facebook was a couple of years ago in terms of breaking from the cognoscenti to the masses. Like any social tool, the value is directly proportional to the value of the people you’re connected with - a network of bozos is worth very little. Right now there are a disproportionate number of highly interesting people on Twitter, it’ll be interesting to see if an influx of new users increases or dilutes the value.
Can’t resist a brief plug: I’m running a Twitter Business Plan Contest