Sunday, March 15th, 2009
I made a comment on Twitter the other day that Facebook wants to be Twitter and Twitter wants to be Facebook. What I meant by this statement is that Twitter has a more robust community conversation stream. Facebook simply can’t match it because the social graph, as defined by Facebook, has inherent walls that prevent a wide open conversation. Only your friends can follow your conversations on Facebook, and by befriending people on Facebook, you are opening more of your life up to those followers than you would on Twitter.
Twitter wants the user trust that Facebook has. Twitter is increasingly appealing to spammers because you can reach a mass audience very quickly. Phishing techniques and blackhat apps have also added some spam to the community. Facebook is very successful in combatting these tactics. The absence of this element has given Facebook a distinct advantage of former social networking juggernaut MySpace. Today, Facebook has functionality superiority over Twitter. It would be much easier for Facebook to emulate Twitter than for Twitter to emulate Facebook.
So, will the changes that Facebook made to their homepage this week take them into the direction of becoming Twitter? I don’t think so. What I believe Facebook has to do to create a Twitter-like environment is introduce a new layer that allows members to follow other members without committing to a full friendship. This would then create an identical environment on Facebook and through this new interface, a user could follow others that they may not actually know in real life and build an online friendship through this communication that could then progress into a full Facebook friendship.
I believe this is a practical approach to Facebook’s dilemma. I am interested in what you think about the matter.
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
I enjoy Twitter. I am more of a microblogger than a blogger. There isn’t enough time in the day for me to write blogs the way I can write tweets. Many people are this way. Time doesn’t permit many of us to write blogs. Others just don’t have the chops to write 300+ word articles about whatever it is that they have to say. This is beauty and charm of Twitter. You can blog without blogging. You can contribute with minimal time invested.
There is a small gap that I think Twitter misses. You see, Twitter is a concept based off cross communication between web and mobile interfaces. A Twitter user can just as easily communicate using SMS (or text message for the less technically inclined readers out there) as you could use the Twitter website itself to add an update. With this interface comes restrictions that are necessary to make the platform compatible with text messaging. SMS requires an individual message to be 160 characters or less. As a result, Twitter has to limit its message lengths to 140 characters. This limits what we can say. We may not have a lot to say but what we want to say may exceeed 140 characters.
Today, many of us use iphones, blackberrys or other web enabled mobile devices to communicate via email or even through a mobile application. The group of people who are forced to communicate remotely with Twitter via SMS is shrinking everyday. So my question is this. At some point does it not make sense for Twitter or another service to offer an expanded character service. I am not saying open ended, but 200 characters instead of 140 characters really can change the game in a way that is not overbearing but enabling for a user to complete say his message without truncating it. If not expanding from 140 characters on public updates, at least letting the direct messages be open ended. These messages can now be delivered to users through email an application on their mobile devices.
So, is there another servicing lurking in the shadows, awaiting the opportunity to rise up and seize on what could be perceived as Twitter’s blind spot or is this a notion that is off base?
