Twitter vs. Facebook

I can't find anything to really disagree with in this article, but I feel like it gives Twitter too much credit or Facebook too little.

What Twitter has done so far is A) implement a cool and novel idea and B) cross the chasm with it to mainstream adoption. Those things are no small achievement. Of course the Twitter guys should be proud of that and I don't mean to disparage that in any way. It puts them in very good company.

However Facebook has gone an extra several orders of magnitude to bring them into the league of the Amazons and Googles. Two things Facebook has done are A) develop a business leadership that can reinvent the whole product every 6 months and actually continue to grow wildly as a result of these radical tactical shifts and (even more impressively) B) an engineering team that can keep up with this and deal with scalability profiles that make Google look like child's play all the while pushing code to production on a daily basis as if they were some kind of garage startup.

Twitter on the other hand took years to build a small team that was capable of scaling the existing minimalistic application, and what do they have now? A simple application and API that is somewhat mainstream, but also with only 1% of the hooks and stickiness that Facebook has established.

I don't even particularly like Facebook, I think it's a waste of time and that Mark Zuckerberg probably would have no moral qualms about reducing the entire world productivity down to a trickle by means of viral Zynga-style brain-crap. However I have to admit that there's always some hook that brings me back into Facebook (oh I gotta see so-and-so's photos or I'll just use Facebook Connect to log into this site because it's easy).

For Twitter to get there they need to figure out how to get past the geeky niche users, the vapid celebrities, and the huckster marketeers to find something wildly compelling to people. 140-characters is a nice idea, but it's not the kind of idea that's easy to make essential to people. Twitter has a long and steep road ahead and I fully expect an undervalued exit at some point rather than an IPO or massive profitability.

I'm still desperately trying to figure out where exactly the Twitter platform is supposed to end. Are we supposed to believe that a platform these days is an all encompassing primarily closed ecosystem like Facebook (which I suppose is good from a business standpoint) or something more fast and loose like Twitter up until this new direction?

Tumblr is better.

All this twitter and facebook nonsense must be explainable using cuils.