How Facebook Could Kill Twitter Overnight | Hacker News Reader

How Facebook Could Kill Twitter Overnight

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10 pointspeter12329 comments

This shows a complete lack of understanding of Twitter.

Twitter does status updates and does them amazingly well.

You (more-or-less) know that all of your followers read all of your statuses.

You can get Tweets from any device remotely connected to anything. SMS, Firefox, desktop, iGoogle, web, etc. This would take a lot of time for Facebook to catch up on.

And with Twitter there is no other noise. Statuses are the entire thing. That focuses you on that. You don't get distracted by pictures, videos, relationship status changes, etc. That focuses it, which is very appealing to users.

No one would make Twitter-like apps centered around statuses because people don't care that much about statuses on Facebook, and people wouldn't start caring about statuses because there would be no Twitter-like apps to make getting statuses easy and versatile.

It takes a lot to totally transform how people use a service like making Facebook Twitter-centric would.

You can in your preferences tweak FB to prioritize status updates in your newsfeed and de-prioritize everything else.

Or just click the status updates tab.

I know that both of these are true, but it's not the point.

People would need a lot to start using facebook like Twitter. They'd need to be able to get all of the statuses via SMS, Firefox Extensions, etc, etc.

People overall don't use Facebook statuses like they do Twitter, and that inertia will take a lot more than allowing people to make apps that would show people their friends' statuses.

Inertia is a powerful force, and that larger userbase would somewhat be a disadvantage in that regard. It's more people they have to get to switch over to using statuses like they would Twitter. Getting that process started would be almost impossible.

Right now a call to Facebook’s Users.getInfo API call will return the user’s [...]profile...if Facebook added status to this method, Twitter would be destroyed.

No it wouldn't.

I'll say this as simply as I can for anyone who ever plans on saying how Facebook will kill/destroy/et al Twitter: Don't. Facebook and Twitter cater to complete different tastes of two almost entirely different audiences.

I have to disagree with you completely (then again I wrote the article :) ) ... Twitter is just a feature for the most part ... you could instantly port Twitter to Facebook in a day or two with a little bit of programming

It's "just a feature" (I don't agree with this, btw - it's a service) with about a billion separate implementations (brightkite, facebook status, jaiku, friendfeed, tumblr, etc, etc), and yet it still exists as the market leader in the space even though pretty much all of these sites do it "better" in some way.

Did you write this article simply as linkbait, or do you really believe it?

Simply showing up and saying you can migrate data from one into the foundations of another doesn't at all sustain any sort of argument that a distributed Facebook Status model will "kill" Twitter. The modus operandi is drastically different between the two sites. Twitter isn't a "feature", it's a "service", a highly extensible and mobile service. The fact that it is focused on such a simple protocol as telling people what you are doing, imo will ensure its longevity.

Given that people look at Facebook statuses as a mere extension of a user's profile, versus a Twitter timeline actually serving as your profile, simply distributing your Facebook status on a web page isn't going to phase Twitter one bit.

And I still stand by what I said earier: Facebook and Twitter users aren't the same. Mark might update his status on Facebook "Mark is at the ball game" but on Twitter, he'll probably say "Local sports team is up by 4! Go team!". The inherent purpose and utilitarian value of the two sites are completely different for one to arbitrarily overthrow the other, just because the one (Facebook) mimics the distribution of the other (Twitter)

Statuses on Twitter and Facebook are just text fields, although Facebook's starts with your name. The differences between how they are predominantly used are results of socialization, and many people use Facebook statuses like you've described Twitter's and vice versa.

My Twitter network is completely different from my Facebook network.

That is why Facebook can't easily kill Twitter.

Add Facebook Connect and a way for people to import all their twitter updates in 1 minute and you've come up with an easy way to kill Twitter

Twitter is a really easy service to underestimate. If Facebook could wipe out a competitor that easily don't you think they would have done this already?

Okay, I will prove my point using what you've just said: if people are importing their Twitter feeds into Facebook, instead of letting Facebook status serve as their alert beacon for friends, what do you think that says about the user value of Facebook status updates?

For some people at least, Twitter beats Facebook simply by only doing statuses and not exposing you to all the other crap.

With Twitter, I don't have to waste my time ignoring the latest Knighthood Invitation or the Group Created to Get Enough People in the Group to Advance Cause X w/ No Substantive Effort Invitation.

It would take more than a day or two. There are good points that can be made as to how FB could take on Twitter. FB has enough cash to do the job well if it wanted to. FB could also decide to become open in certain aspects and stay closed with other features. Anything could happen. I only want to see Twitter stick around to see more competition. Otherwise I could care less.

Facebook and Twitter cater to complete different tastes of two almost entirely different audiences

This is the important point. Facebook will never be as succinct as Twitter. Facebook will never fit in the palm of your hand the way Twitter does. I use Twitter-Facebook integration. No one comments on my tweets in Facebook.

This is total piffle.

The important difference between Facebook and Twitter is one is open and the other isn't.

People already in Facebook's ecosystem use status like Twitter, and people inside and out use Twitter to update their status.

Yeah well, like I said in the blog comments:

Facebook: full-fledged social network. Twitter: simple, quick-posting environment.

There IS a big difference between these two sites, Facebook won't kill twitter, we can go to sleep calmly now :)

Why would it want to? Facebook and Twitter have completely different goals

I think one can safely assume that any article containing the phrase "could kill x by changing only y" is worthless drivel. The author has hit correctly on the fundamental difference between the service, but veers into crazy town suggesting that changing one service kills another. I think humans have a replacement bias, assuming that new thing x will replace old thing y, a bias rarely borne by fact. Did planes replace trains? Where's my paperless office? Tools have affordances. If facebook didn't work the way it does, it wouldn't be facebook, and the same for twitter.

More importantly, why, exactly, does facebook want/need to kill twitter?

I would also say this shows a lack of understanding on the Facebook API. Even if status updates were accessible by the User.getInfo, facebook applications would still only be able to access the status updates for the user running the application and that users friends. No massive scraping/broadcasting like in twitter.

You are wrong ... you don't need session keys to access public data as I stated in the article ... read the developer wiki in regards to what can be displayed without a session key

With the fb API, and you can get statuses, just not the history of statuses like in Twitter.

I doubt opening that up would kill twitter. There's a matter of cultural momentum and social ecosystem that's already in place that's not going to be abandoned in a blink.

An interesting question to ask:

If facebook provides a blogging feature, would it kill wordpress.com or blogger.com?

Facebook has "notes". It hasn't killed those services because it's geared more towards private use than public, and Facebook's other features (photo and link sharing) have replaced most of what people used to use private blogs for.

Totally disagree, a blogging platform is not a feature ... status updates is

is there a difference between status updates and microblogging?

Look at it like this: status updates on facebook => telling someone sitting next to you you're getting married. microblogging => having a wedding shower. It's all about the broad spectrum of recipients and how the data is distributed, at least imo.

Facebook users are used to basically only broadcasting updates to the people they know. I think would take a long time and energy for FB to get them to accept twitter-style openness and it would probably make a lot of FB users look for a new platform. Also FB makes you tie your real name to your profile whereas Twitter lets you use an assumed username which I think is necessary for twitter style microblogging.

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