Twitter Will Trump Facebook

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Writing on Entrecard Graham Langdon makes the argument Twitter will be bigger than Facebook. He's right. Twitter is many things but it lacks the baggage and some of the "creepy" aspects of Facebook. All within 140 characters, Twitter is IM, email, mobile app, chat room, focus group, news source, a wall on which to bounce ideas, a research resource, presence indicator.

It's usually the simplest of things that have the most value. Facebook is bloated. Twitter is Internet Lite (I refuse to dub it anything with a 2.0 attached). It's a simple but ever so powerful interface that brings so many things together and functions as a jumping off point to an endless collection of resources and information.

It's pretty much guaranteed you'll interpret this as idiotic puffery but until you use Twitter, really use it for a while, you won't really understand what you're missing and you don't realy have the right to comment. Seriously. Give it a try.

by Steve Hall    Apr- 7-08   Click to Comment   
Topic: Opinion, Social   

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Comments



Comments

Bold statement Steve. I can definitely see it blowing up, the one item that might make this theory hard to become a reality is manageability. If you have 600 friends on Facebook it is somewhat harder to manage the same on Twitter as too many streams at one time makes you miss conversations.

That being said, I would say that total time spent on Twitter vs. Facebook would certainly be competitive especially since so many people leave it up all day on their desktop/browser.

Posted by: Len Kendall on April 7, 2008 10:14 AM

Been saying the same myself:
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2008/04/hoarding-data-can-seriously-damage-your.html

Posted by: david cushman on April 7, 2008 10:16 AM

Want to ditto that last paragraph about it seeming pointless until you really use it for a while.

At which point it becomes totally addictive and you start thinking of all your friends as "@JDoe"

Posted by: Toad on April 7, 2008 10:18 AM

having used both, I have to agree that there are too many apps for Facebook and that I don't want to participate in all of them. I wish they would allow you to truly opt out without ignoring the person (reply, thanks but no thanks sans the ignore feature)

I can get a LOT out to people on facebook but what the ads bother me.

Twitter is interesting but it moves so fast, that it's like a raging river that's at flood crest stage. How does one MANAGE all the tweets and given that I have missed some up to 3+ weeks later, and they were valuable 411 for me, that's not good either.
there's got to be some sort of partial mix

Stevie

Posted by: Stevie on April 7, 2008 2:18 PM

I really think it depends on what you use both Facebook and Twitter for. I am not a Twitter user (though I've got an account). I guess I still need to figure out how to best use it. That aside, I did upload my personal (and some business) contacts to see if I knew anyone using Twitter, and of the several hundred contacts I have in my personal address book, there were only like 4 or 5 Twitter users. Of those, I'm sure not all of them are active users. I have several hundred Facebook friends. I use this for mostly personal connections. I prefer LinkedIn for professional networking. I am not sure I agree with the above comment that Twitter > Facebook. I think they have very different uses.

Posted by: Kim on April 7, 2008 3:41 PM

I think Twitter has a much higher entrance requirement than Facebook. I didn't mean the availability of registration, but the ability to really get into the network, converse, and form relationships with other fellow twitters. On twitter, simplicity is the power and you're forced to. The info flow is also amazing.However, Just as Kim said, they have different purposes and would serve different people.

Posted by: Jia Liu on April 7, 2008 3:57 PM

I'm fairly new to Twitter and consider myself tech-savvy... any recommendations on how to make the most of it? Perhaps some creative or productive examples?

Posted by: Dave on April 7, 2008 4:50 PM

I've never used any of them, but after reading this post I will try Twitter and see for myself.

Posted by: virtual millenium on April 10, 2008 3:54 PM

Perhaps that is one reason for its growing popularity. Twitter has been growing exponentially. I have seen the use of twitter in the time of crisis, its amazing.

Posted by: David on March 16, 2009 1:26 AM