How a small change to Facebook could kill Twitter

How a small change to Facebook could kill Twitter

September 14th, 2009 / Posted by Nathan T. Wright

On August 18th, I tweeted this:

Today, in a move that established me as a modern-day Nostradamus, Facebook activated this exact feature. But in all seriousness, this is something Facebook has been contemplating / working on for months, and many users have been clamoring for it. Basically, the popular social network has turned on the ability for you to “tag” your friends in your status updates, simply by typing the “@” symbol and then choosing from an auto-fill drop-down menu. (Pages, events and groups can also be tagged.)

Seems like a simple add-on, right? So what are the long-term implications of this?

First of all, this feature is very Twitter-like. When Twitter came on the scene a few years back, mentioning friends via @replies and effortlessly creating links to them was one of the more appealing features. Over time, some lazy people (myself included) have set up our Twitter feed to update our Facebook status, negating the need to update in both places. This small change may now encourage many of us to update our status natively in the Facebook platform. It might also be appealing to those who “dabbled” in Twitter but never found any real value there.

Translation: Facebook wants you to think Facebook first, other networks second.

Status tagging is just one of many recent tweaks the social network has made to incrementally erode away Twitter’s core user base, including Facebook Lite (a stripped-down, bare-bones, Twitter-like version of the interface) and the ability to publish Page updates to a Twitter feed. (With links back to your content on Facebook, of course.) See the trend here? Facebook first.

Now, a logical person could make the case that no matter how many features Facebook adds, it can’t duplicate the Twitter experience because there are clear differences in the groups of friends you keep on each network. In other words, the quality of connections make the network.

I 100% agree with this, but I’m writing this post from the perspective of Facebook, which is a business, and that business is dedicated to going Scorched Earth on Twitter until there’s nothing left. Make no mistake about it, these social networks are fierce competitors. Remember that Facebook attempted to acquire Twitter back in 2008, believing that status updates were vital to the future of information sharing. Twitter spurned that offer, and since then Facebook bought Friendfeed, another (lesser-known) micro-sharing service, which was definitely a shot across Twitter’s bow.

Facebook and Twitter are at war over your social graph. Where do you stand? Will these recent changes change your social networking activity in the near future, one way or the other? What stand do you think Twitter can make to combat this? Please leave your thoughts below, I’m excited to hear all of your perspectives.

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Filed under: Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter
Tagged as: Facebook, Facebook Lite, Facebook status tagging, Facebook vs. Twitter, Friendfeed

JHF

It sure would be nice to find someone, anyone, anywhere, writing about social media with a viewpoint that goes beyond "HEY WOW THIS IS GONNA BE HUGE," especially when writing about FaceBorg.

Nahgonehappen though, is it? :-)

John Pemble

What I am finding out is the shift of Facebook having a more Twitterlike presence is still not able to compete with the simplicity of Twitter. Even Facebook lite is cluttered with it's long messsages. You know when you hear some people saying "man if Twitter had more characters..." well you know what... now you have them with Facebook. I predict it will increase use but it won't change Twitter nor take away Twitter users. I just woke up my sleeping Facebook account but as I've entered that world this summer I make my Twitter and Facebook experience a bit different. I do post longer messages on Facebook but I post less often. I do not link my Twitter and Facebook account, mostly because half of my Facebook friends are already Twitter followers. So far Twitter is doing more for me than Facebook but I only have 20% the number of friends on Facebook than I do Twitter. We'll see if there is a shift in 2010. I don't think there will be for me.

Aaron Weiche

Interesting discussion and some great points from your commenters. I'm the same, my audience, interaction and conversation on Twitter is different from Facebook. Then again I often discuss the blurred line of work and personal life ... so this fits that discussion. Would more business/work communication ruin facebook? Would more personal talk ruin twitter? All depends doesn't it. Thanks Nathan for a great topic.

Ryan

Other than this morning where I thanked a friend for showing me that this functionality was possible, I don't think I have ever had a desire to call out people on FB. To me, FB feels like group journal, while Twitter is definitely a group newsfeed/promo. There are just such different feeling for the two that I don't believe that FB or Twitter have anything to worry about in their respective markets. I am of the belief that Twitter is business and FB is pleasure.

RawleyKing

Twitter has nothing to fear. Users aren't going to sift through all the clutter on Facebook to see updates. The way I see it, Twitter is news you can use (most of the time) and Facebook is news you can't use (most of the time). Besides, the both of them should exist - it's your choice to integrate them, or not. No matter how much Facebook evolves, Twitter has nailed it with the no-nonsense way of sharing.

SheenaLara

If Facebook recognized twitter handles and it auto linked to a fan page or friend, that would be awesome! My accounts are linked so that would be icing on the cake for me.

Susan AH

I'm with Genie and DrZWard on this one, for all the reasons they've already stated.

DrZWard

Here's the difference for me: I can check Facebook every 4 days and not miss a thing. The activity level, at least for my network, is relatively limited: people uploading pictures of their kids and taking quizzes...that's about it.

If I skip 3 days on Twitter then on average I've missed 700-1000 tweets per day, and there's no way I'm going back to find them all. (And I'm only following a little over 300). I think I can tweet about 10 times per day without wearing out my welcome, provided I'm sharing interesting information. Anyone, at least in my network, who updates FB status that many times is standing out like a sore thumb.

Until Facebook loads 10 times faster, and allows various stages of following and friending with relevant privacy settings for each, there's no way Facebook will ever carve into the niche that Twitter has created. I've played with Facebook lite, and they aren't there yet. As your other readers have written, they are 2 different networks (personal vs. business/personal). 2 different communication cultures. And I like it that way.

Reid Travis

It will be used in an entirely different way than Twitter mentions. The only reason people @ mention on Twitter is because it's the only way to get a persons attention, you only have one box to work with! If you talk about someone or to someone on Facebook, you do it on their wall, not your own status. Facebook status updates are me me me, wall posts are for friends. I think a lot of people will use it when writing on a friends wall and they want to reference a mutual friend. I don't see it being used in personal status updates though. However, I do give Facebook a lot of props for closing the gap between simultaneous updates of Facebook and Twitter. Only a matter of time before Google finally comes out with a webpage that is one bar and one button and a single click updates every social network known to man. ;)

WindBreak247

Like your Tweet says, until Facebook allows you to link to entities you aren't friends with/a fan of/etc and have them know about it, Twitter will still hold a niche. I like that I can Tweet about a person or company that I'm not necessarily following or being followed by, and they will know about it if they choose to. There's a lot of power, or at least a feeling of power, in that. For this to happen on Facebook, unless they change their "connection" model, it would seem you would need to be friends or a fan, which doesn't seem realistic. On Twitter, I follow anyone and anything I'm interested in, because all there is to it is the stream of consciousness aspect that I can quickly decide to partake in or ignore, but with Facebook there's so much more to it, so I primarily use it as a way to remain connected with people and entities that I know, patronize, etc. I don't waste my time friending or being a fan of any and every company, celebrity, or other entity that I may be interested in, because I'm not going to visit their pages often, and in most cases its just a lame promtional entity that will clog up my home page.

Of course, this is just me personally. I'm sure there's a large portion of the Facebook user community that friend and are fans of anything and everything they are the least bit interested in, and the Twitter model could theoretically work. But the "power of Twitter" to me, is that no two way connection is required for you to "connect" with ANYONE on Twitter.

There are numerous examples I could provide, but I think its bad form to have a comment longer than the blog post itself. :-)

Jarad

Nathan,
I agree that Facebook is getting closer to replicating Twitter's features, however I think there is room for both to survive and thrive. Twitter has some work ahead of them as far as staying relevant and eliminating annoying spam accounts. Facebook just took a giant step towards replicating and improving on Twitter's features.
The quality of the people connections made and strengthened via the two services are quite different in my view. I find it much easier to discover people with similar interests via Twitter. On the other hand, I find it much easier to stay in touch with friends and family via Facebook. I don't think Twitter can replicate that aspect of Facebook just yet.
Most importantly though, is the difference in the type of information that I share (and I think there are many people like me) on the two platforms. 98% of my Twitter followers have no interest in my personal life wheras 98% of my Facebook friends are very interested. If Facebook succeeds at making a 'better Twitter,' I think I would have to start maintaining two different Facebook profiles.

Genie

Perhaps I'm just sticking my head in the sand, but I most definitely use the two services in completely different ways. First, yes -- on Twitter I have a MUCH broader network, and am willing to maintain that network, than I am willing to do on Facebook. That's because, regardless of privacy settings, I'm sharing much more personal information on Facebook that I'm not willing to share with my random Twitter followers, and I don't trust completely that I can customize my privacy settings enough to make a truly "public" list of contacts in my network.

Also, Facebook requires mutual friending, where on Twitter, people can follow me if they're interested in what I have to say, but I don't have to follow them back, and vice versa. Yes, that's not very "social," but it's a feature that I would not want incorporated into Facebook.

The new Facebook tagging feature is cool, but it's not going to replace Twitter for me. Not by a long shot.