Facebook’s Response To Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s Response To Twitter

techcrunch.com

53 pointsthepanister28 comments

I still don't get Twitter. I'm sorry, I've tried. I know that it's considered hopelessly square to be behind the twitter trend, but I just don't appreciate it. Maybe it's my phone device? Do most people use twitter desktop software? What do you do about people who constantly tweet, half the time garbage and half the time gems? It's just a constant barrage.

I am really new to Twitter, forced on by some friends. In all honesty, I feel yow. I am going to force myself to use it for a week. Perhaps we need to migrate away from the web based portal to the site? I am going to try a more power app. Maybe I will figure it out, right now it is just noise.

Here's how I grok Twitter. Others may have a different opinion:

A few years ago, I was working on some contracts that had me regularly traveling. Plenty of friends couldn't quite be bothered to keep track of where I was at any given day, so I started using my IM status line to show where I was and what I happened to be doing. And this was useful among the group of us. When I started using Twitter, I used it the same way: letting people who care (might not be the world) know where I was and what I was working on.

Now I use Twitter not only for quick "what I'm doing" updates, but also for quick "what I just read" or "what I'm wondering about" updates. They're the sort of comments and thoughts that aren't worth a blog post, but are still worth talking about. For example: yesterday I spent a few minutes looking at ways to combine my IRC and Jabber clients and maybe Twitter too. So I wrote a few tweets about it. That night I was out at a tech social event and some friends commented about the tweets, sparking some interesting conversation.

When I'm paying attention to other people's tweets (which isn't all that often), I'm surprised how much I learn about breaking news events, tech or otherwise.

I don't use Twitter's website much at all and I can't stand any tweets being "pushed" to me. I use Moodblast (for mac) to send tweets since it also updates my Facebook, Skype and GTalk status. If it weren't that simple, I wouldn't do it. I still don't have a solution I like for reading other people's tweets. I like reading them on my iPhone using Twitterific, but I don't do that very often. I'm leaning towards using a Twitter Jabber or Twitter IRC bot so that it fits within the tools I already use.

So that's how I use Twitter.

A lot of people say things like this about social software and seemed bothered that they don't understand how they would use it. But it's probably ok if they never do, or at least wait until the use seems obvious.

You almost never hear people talk this way about non-social software. Two years ago, I knew about Quickbooks, didn't use it, and was unconcerned. Now I run a small business, my accountant prefers our books in this program, and I'm happy to use it.

I think the reason this comes up with social software is because we don't have a good vocabulary for talking about our social needs. When Twitter was just getting started, a lot more people would say that they didn't get it and that it had no value, even though empirically some people were clearly getting value.

I'm sorry, but usually it's the opposite for me. I especially appreciate social technologies before they jumped the shark.

Email? It was awesome before everyone and their mother used it. Friendster? It was like the wild wild west, free and easy, until everyone and their mother got on it (and then facebook).

Twitter right now is okay. I forget who mentioned, but they said that everyone would be on twitter in five years. That just sounds horrendous. Twitter is already too diluted with "I have to go to the bathroom." "Nothing is coming." "Okay, things are coming nicely." "I just went to the bathroom." There is going to be one hunded times as much shit on Twitter come five years. Pun intended.

So when someone presents you with a new social technology, how do you decide whether it's a fit for you? What words do you use?

Twitter is useful to me in a few ways -

1. Using Twinkle on my iPhone I can see Tweets from around me within a certain radius. When a major windstorm blew through Cincinnati and 1,000,000 people lost power, I was able to use Twinkle to get updates on where there was and where there was not power in real time. I knew there was power 2 miles away, I knew there was power in certain areas, I knew where to go for a Starbucks.

2. I follow my friends and I can stay up to date with 60 people without much effort. I can reply when I see fit, but not feel bad if I don't reply (which is different than an instant message, where if I don't reply I am an asshole).

3. I have about 800 followers and that continues to grow - if I have a question about something or want a quick opinion I can "ask Twitter" and get about 15-30 responses in less than an hour.

4. Real time search. It is incredible. It helped break the news of the Flight 1549 crash in the Hudson. It shows what popular topics are (it's obvious on an Apple keynote day, but what was going on yesterday? Twitter gives me a really good idea).

Tim O'Reilly's post of last November first made it interesting enough to me to give it a go. Well worth the read, whether you subscribe (to Twitter, or to his thoughts) or not.

Tim O'Reilly: Why I Love Twitter

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/why-i-like-twitter.html

Would it be outrageous to say that Facebook and Twitter are different things and can live in parallel? One of Facebook's strengths is that it maintains private data. Part of what makes Twitter unique is that so much of the data is public. They're both useful, but for different cases.

Totally agree. I don't think this is Facebook trying to kill Twitter. I think it's more Facebook learning why people like Twitter and applying it to their domain of data. Facebook isn't turning into a microblogging platform.

That's very, very interesting.

Facebook is certainly proving to be a dynamic competitor. This could well "bring Twitter to the masses" in a way that Twitter has so far struggled to do.

That said, Twitter itself is on the cusp of achieving this.

And then again, Twitter's quiet unfollow is an important feature of keeping Twitter usable. If someone is overly noisy on Twitter, I can unfollow them. If they do the same on Facebook, what then? Unfriend them? Unlikely.

Say goodbye to Twitter spam, say hello to Facebook status spam.

I hope you're right about Facebook becoming Twitter for the masses so the masses don't infiltrate Twitter.

Well, it seems that web's ultimate battle is going to be for who owns/controls/manages the social graph.

I don't know where that battle is going but I very hope that it will go in the direction of an open/multi-polar solutions.

One antidote to FaceBook/twitter/whoever-owns-everything would be if Open Social or some other solution let any website plug social features and announcements in.

Right now, the main problem with Facebook's message feature is that it is only available to friends as you addressed. You won't want to unfriend somebody because they post too much; if you unfriend, you also lose access to their photos, contact information, and it is also publicaly seen.

Along with the new homepage layout, the most important feature Facebook is adding is the one way follow for celebrity figures. This is very important; it will allow regular users to see the benefits of an individual sharing things about their lives. I believe that Facebook is using these celebrity accounts to sell users on opening up and sharing more information.

I expect one way follows to become open to all Facebook users in the future. Your Facebook account will have two sides: the public information sharing (Twitteresque chatter, links to articles, etc) and the entire profile.

They have to tread carefully, however. Facebook's root is in allowing only those within your network or friend circle to view your information. It will take a dramatic shift in the user's view of their information. If they can succeed, however, I think that Twitter will not be sustainable in the long run.

Just choose "show less" from the nice menu next to each item on hover

The new Facebook homepage layout is similar to a change Twitter made last year as well - moving the filters from horizontal tabs above the feed to a vertical one running next to it. It's a bit more obvious when you look at the current and upcoming layouts side-by-side:

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/newprof...

Twitter made an identical change in September of last year, described in their blog post here:

http://blog.twitter.com/2008/09/changes-afoot.html

The interesting thing is that the rationale is exactly the same for both companies, yet Facebook users already have the ability to form adhoc groups and filters of their contacts, whereas Twitter doesn't. It's probably a big part of the reason why my Facebook friend list feels pretty manageable at close to 300 people, yet following a similar number of people on Twitter drives me a bit nuts and my Twitter feed increasingly feels like a crazy RSS reader with only big giant folder and no sorting abilities. I've been trying to deal with the info firehouse overload by going old school with browser bookmarks and grouping twitter pages by "friends", "designers", "San Francisco", etc.

Have you tried TweetDeck? The 'group' by searching feature is pretty good.

Also, the other suggested solution is to consider using different twitter accounts for different groups of people...

That's a great tip, I've probably gone as far as I can go organization-wise with the browser and w/o using a dedicated twitter client.

The problem with tweetdeck and twhirl and whatever else is that it turns twitter into IM, something constantly on that I have to check and that pops up alerts. I guess you could turn that stuff off, so that's what I'll experiment with.

I've recently gone back to Tweetdeck having tried it when it was first in beta. It's not perfect, but the groups feature is great and I find I'm able to handle following a lot more people because of it.

I've turned off all alerts from Tweetdeck so it doesn't bother me when I'm focussing on work, and use 'clear' in each group when I've finished reading through it. Sometimes that means reading all the updates, others it's just a way of removing the old stuff I'm not going to bother with.

I only have two groups which basically split in to people I know well and want to read, and people who I don't know as well or are very noisy. The latter gets cleared a lot more without reading all the messages but lets me keep track of more local conversations and the interesting nuggets that come up occasionally.

The guy who makes Tweetdeck recently got some funding so he can work on it full time and hire in some extra talent, so it's likely to improve more rapidly than it has been.

Anytime I tell someone about twitter and they say "oh, it's like a web site that just does Facebook status? lol why would I use that?" I feel like Facebook just gained more ground.

Did they announce Facebook status search like Twitter search?

I need this for marketing and social real time search is going to either be extremely complimentary to Google or possibly Google's biggest competitor!

I believe that talking about "social real time search" as Google's biggest competitor is vastly overstating things. Twitter simply cannot produce most of the content that Google can provide. Short opinions, yes. Lengthy product reviews, no. If you're trying to figure out how to solve X problem (say, in an OS installation or in your code, for a technical standpoint), Twitter may well be useless. It's difficult to fit specific, real information into 140 characters.

Twitter search isn't good for reference searches. But it's great for real time opinion and real time opinion can be extremely valuable.

As an example for anyone running a business, that real time opinion is a great way to get and respond to feedback from your customers.

Here is a good example:

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=skittles

We would love to be able to add other status feeds to this tool but so far we haven't found any with a volume that's a significant fraction of Twitter's. A live feed from Facebook would be ideal.

Well pondered if it would be complimentary or a killer.

Though when I use Twitter to search on a real time topic there are more then just thoughts, as Twitters are also sharing and pointing to resources (links) to more info about said topic. What could be done here is incorporate bit.ly into twitter search and have it calculate the most shared (Retweeted) link on said topic and list them somewhere in the interface. Like US Air into Hudson... what is the most shared/relevant (RT) link at that moment.

It possibly could be a competitor or possibly just very complimentary to Google.

The thing that worries me about this is the fact that I was already uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook might be making my private information public. For them to be integrating Twitter-like features doesn't exactly make me feel better. Twitters main draw seems to be in communicating with huge numbers of strangers while Facebook lets me talk to lots of friends at once.

Nothing is changing with privacy. Your updates are still only available to your friends (or whatever you set). The one-way follow is being added for real people to follow companies/public figures.

I think Facebook has already lost too Twitter on this front. When people think Facebook, they think private info and friend's pictures. When people think Twitter, they think public broadcast mechanism.

The identities of the two systems have already been framed -- once that happens it is hard to change the momentum just by competing with features.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com