I still don't get Twitter. I'm sorry, I've tried.
I know that it's considered hopelessly square to be behind the twitter trend, but I just don't appreciate it. Maybe it's my phone device? Do most people use twitter desktop software? What do you do about people who constantly tweet, half the time garbage and half the time gems? It's just a constant barrage.
Would it be outrageous to say that Facebook and Twitter are different things and can live in parallel? One of Facebook's strengths is that it maintains private data. Part of what makes Twitter unique is that so much of the data is public. They're both useful, but for different cases.
That's very, very interesting.<p>Facebook is certainly proving to be a dynamic competitor. This could well "bring Twitter to the masses" in a way that Twitter has so far struggled to do.<p>That said, Twitter itself is on the cusp of achieving this.<p>And then again, Twitter's quiet unfollow is an important feature of keeping Twitter usable. If someone is overly noisy on Twitter, I can unfollow them. If they do the same on Facebook, what then? Unfriend them? Unlikely.<p>Say goodbye to Twitter spam, say hello to Facebook status spam.
The new Facebook homepage layout is similar to a change Twitter made last year as well - moving the filters from horizontal tabs above the feed to a vertical one running next to it. It's a bit more obvious when you look at the current and upcoming layouts side-by-side:<p><a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/newprofile.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/newprof...</a><p>Twitter made an identical change in September of last year, described in their blog post here:<p><a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2008/09/changes-afoot.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.twitter.com/2008/09/changes-afoot.html</a><p>The interesting thing is that the rationale is exactly the same for both companies, yet Facebook users already have the ability to form adhoc groups and filters of their contacts, whereas Twitter doesn't. It's probably a big part of the reason why my Facebook friend list feels pretty manageable at close to 300 people, yet following a similar number of people on Twitter drives me a bit nuts and my Twitter feed increasingly feels like a crazy RSS reader with only big giant folder and no sorting abilities. I've been trying to deal with the info firehouse overload by going old school with browser bookmarks and grouping twitter pages by "friends", "designers", "San Francisco", etc.
Anytime I tell someone about twitter and they say "oh, it's like a web site that just does Facebook status? lol why would I use that?" I feel like Facebook just gained more ground.
Did they announce Facebook status search like Twitter search?<p>I need this for marketing and social real time search is going to either be extremely complimentary to Google or possibly Google's biggest competitor!
The thing that worries me about this is the fact that I was already uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook might be making my private information public. For them to be integrating Twitter-like features doesn't exactly make me feel better. Twitters main draw seems to be in communicating with huge numbers of strangers while Facebook lets me talk to lots of friends at once.
I think Facebook has already lost too Twitter on this front. When people think Facebook, they think private info and friend's pictures. When people think Twitter, they think public broadcast mechanism.<p>The identities of the two systems have already been framed -- once that happens it is hard to change the momentum just by competing with features.