I started using Twitter a little more than four weeks ago. Up to that point I mainly used Facebook. A few days after creating my account I updated my Facebook status with my new Twitter info. My post sparked a few replies questioning the usefulness of Twitter. One person called out for “help”, claiming complete Twitter illiteracy. And that is the inspiration for this post. Since both of these platforms are significantly changing communications and media, I thought it a good exercise to compare how they work and the role each plays:
Facebook:
Facebook is about re-connecting with the people you know or knew: old classmates from high school & collage, current friends, co-workers and family members. This is your personal community and Facebook lets you keep in touch with them through photos, videos and status updates.
Your experience on Facebook depends on how witty your status updates are and the number of friends you have. It satisfies all of our voyeuristic tendencies, allowing users to look over their neighbor’s virtual fence and see what’s going on.
If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg you will come to understand that Facebook wants to be your single, one stop online destination. To accomplish this Facebook is pulling everything and anything you do online into Facebook (e.g. Facebook Connect). In addition to games & puzzles, Facebook has social commerce where you can buy flowers from 1-800 Flowers or shop Best Buy, all without leaving the platform.
It is also important to note that most of the user interaction happens on his or her home page. Since everything is dumped right into your newsfeed, Facebook provides little to no incentive for you to explore the site in any depth.
All this said, I believe Facebook is looking and acting more like a portal, similar to Yahoo! or AOL. Obviously it is providing a significantly more advanced portal experience.
Twitter:
Twitter is about personal discovery and finding new people and information. Unlike Facebook, most of your followers are only known virtually. Your Twitter experience depends on who you follow and what you re-tweet. While Facebook connects you to your personal community, Twitter is a connection to the global community. Trending topics, re-tweets, and blog links, all give you a glimpse into the worlds mind in any given day, hour, minute.
Twitter is like Google, before Google became a software company. It provides a new way to navigate the web and find information. It makes you link deeper and deeper into the web as you find more interesting content. Here is my typical Twitter experience: spotting an interesting tweet or trending topic, clicking on the included link to a blog post, finding and clicking on another link to an article referenced in the comments section. I’m now 2-3 pages from where I started.
As I mentioned, each of these platforms are wildly innovative and changing everything we thought we knew about media. Both will continue to play an important but unique role in defining how we communicate in the future. My suggestion is to give both a try.
Happy tweeting and FB’ing!
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