Ask YC: Is it just me?

5 points·amarcus··3 comments

isn't twitter pretty much facebook status messages. If someone just makes a service which uses the facebook api to get your friend's status messages, would they not have cloned twitter. Facebook has a much larger userbase and obviously scales much better than twitter. You can update your status in facebook using a number of different ways (api, web, mobile etc...). Whats the big deal with twitter? I can't understand it.

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No, but almost. First, twitter, unlike facebook, is asymmetric. Therefore, I can follow all my favorite web-celebrities, and they can totally ignore me. Second, because twitter is about more then just the most recent message from that user. It's an aggregation of those messages.

I think the real use for twitter comes from either sending out links, or mentioning breaking news (like, for example, tim russert's death, which zipped around twitter long before it broke).

In that regard, I think the a more "proper" mental model for twitter isn't so much as aggregated facebook status messages, but more like distributed reddit (except, in a central place... so.. psuedo-distributed?).

Or...get ready for the deep philosophical epiphany...

are facebook status messages pretty much tweets?

I almost always write tweets beginning with 'is...'.

I use twitter as a substitute for blogging, which I can't possibly commit to (takes me too long to write a post).

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