Mar 23, 2009
Facebook recently launched a new user interface for their web portal. The initial reception was not very good, with most users disliking it. Things went so far that a developer created an app to get users opinions with 95% responding that they did not like the design. With such negativity its hard to believe that this could represent a dramatic shift in the social network scene.
Twitter has been a tear recently, with nearly 1000% growth over the last 12 months. Breaking into the mainstream has been really tough for twitter, but it is finally seeing success.
One of the main problems with growing so fast, is that twitter has attracted a lot of attention from marketers, trying to sell a product or promote their drug (not always a bad thing). With an advertising model, attracting this crowd can be great for a company, as in the case of google. But without that income stream these marketers just seem to take up space. This gives twitter a bit of an ‘artificial’ feeling. For example on my personal twitter account, I have just about 300 followers but I probably only know about 50 of them at most.
This brings us to the facebook advantage. On my facebook account I know everybody I have listed as a friend, thats 100%. When I ‘tweet’ on facebook I have a nearly a 100% response rate from my friends and I probably average 2-3 responses per update. Unless you have thousands upon thousands of followers, this very unlikely to happen on twitter. This change in design has altered my behavior to stop using twitter and instead switched to use facebook. By offering me the opportunity to connect with my friends via tweets and not just everybody on the internet, facebook is converting me back to their platform.
Although people may not like the new update is much, since it makes facebook harder to use for its original purpose. It is making it a lot easier to connect and share thoughts with people online, likely their new goal. So unless twitter knows how to utilize their legions of marketers they should be scared.
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