Friday, June 26th, 2009
The Epic Facebook/Twitter Faceoff
This week Facebook’s new “Messaging Service” went into Beta Mode, allowing users to have any post they make be pushed to the ENTIRE world wide web, just their friends list or just specific friends, another blatant attempt by Facebook to emulate their increasingly popular competition, Twitter.
As of late it feels like Facebook is becoming less and less original, which is what cast them into the forefront in the first place. Facebook was a novel invention that re-cast the mold of ’social networking,’ and now that they have the slightest bit of real competition for users (because, lets be honest, MySpace is long gone the way of the Friendster) they’ve spun into panic mode. Facebook, take a second and relax. Evaluate what it is you do better than Twitter and capitalize on that. Twitter does an amazing job of fulfilling people’s desires to have their random thoughts heard by everyone at any given time, no clutter, simple interface. Facebook excels at creating the complete community aspect where you become part of a group and can interact with friends via messaging, updates, photos, videos, etc, etc. So why try and cram yourself into the one dimensional aspect of Twitter? Twitter was innovative in the sense that it took one simple aspect and made a mountain out of it. Facebook, you’ve got the mountain already, just continue to focus on what makes the WHOLE experience better, not what one component you can change to be more like your competition (a competition who doesn’t provide a fraction of the services you provide, nor intends to).
There. Got that all out in the open and we can all be friends again.
ghubacek on July 10th, 2009 at 11:58 am
amen.