Why developers should build single-purpose websites
briancray.com
briancray.com
If you're not going to make any sense, you might as well go all the way.
The functionality of each is so distinct from the other, for the most part, that they're more likely to develop means of benefiting from the existence of the other than to have any chance of crushing the other. In fact, since Facebook already has rudimentary Twitter-like capabilities, I'd say Facebook is more likely to be a Twitter killer than the other way around, because the main attractions of Facebook are not the Twitter-like capabilities.
. . . not that I'm particularly interested in either. For those who are, though, I can see how each has its own, separate, not necessarily competitive attraction.
Thus, splitting your links over 5 or 50 or 500 properties tends to mean you rank for a LOT less than you would have had you "put your eggs in one basket", even if you get marginally more links in aggregate to the portfolio than you would have gotten to the single site.
The only exception to this which jumps out at me is exact match domains, because they can rank with many, many less links than an identical page on non-exact match domain. (For those who are new to this concept: if your query is exactly [exact match domain], then exactmatchdomain{.com|.net|.org} and a few major country TLDs get an automatic and massive bonus in their rankability for that query and that query alone. My main domain has thousands of links, many from fairly authoritative sources like e.g. google.com. My mini-sites on exact match domains generally start with one link from my blog and outrank the main site within a week or two.)
If you have a focused page, not only will you probably attract more links, but those links will use more relevant search terms and Google will understand the page to be more relevant to the terms as well. Other inbound links for some other service will not have much value at all for the searches in question, and even when they do, are they the difference that pushes you into the top 5 positions?
Of course, if multiple services make sense under one umbrella than by all means keep them in one domain or even one page. As usual with SEO, the foundation is first making sure that what you're doing makes sense from a user perspective.
Besides that I find this whole comparison ridiculous. The friend vs follower dichotomy pretty much puts the two services in different categories. In theory some third party service could overlay some Facebook-like functionality on top of Twitter, but will such an arrangement have the usability and critical mass that Facebook has? Will Twitter be compelling to regular people as it becomes more and more dominated by marketing? Is the 1% of Facebook functionality that Twitter provides compelling enough to get the masses to switch?
1. Twitter has nothing to do with early adopters anymore...they were on freaking Oprah.
2. They've been around for 3.5 years, which is only a couple years less than Facebook, so it's not like they're this little upstart that's trying to unseat the ancient Facebook.
3. Facebook has way more retention and engagement / user.
4. Facebook does what Twitter does (status updates), and does it better, IMO.
5. My parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents all use Facebook. They find value in it, and it enriches their life. Twitter is useless to them.
6. Twitter now is mostly marketers and spammers, judging from the people trying to follow me.
7. Most people seem to talk on Twitter way more than they listen. Over time, this drives down engagement, which means that people have to talk louder and more often to get any attention.
8. Most importantly, Facebook has hundreds of millions in annual revenue, and is predicting cashflow positive in 2010. Twitter has yet to make a dollar (to my knowledge).
EDIT: Added a few more points
On the Oprah point: Oprah was a very recent event. Not sure it's had a long enough time to make an impact. And adoption of Twitter has gone up significantly since that spot.
Umm... :)
Regardless, it's been more than four months since that point, which is around 10% of Twitter's total life.
Twitter actually does it better -- but, because Twitter doesn't do anything else, everything on Twitter goes into the "status update" interface, which results in severe clutter. In short, Twitter's status update functionality is better, but the social effects on it are damaging enough to make Facebook actually better suited to status updating in practice.
It's sort of an academic quibble, I guess, but sometimes those are the most fun.
Do you have anything to support his at all?
Thanks for your feedback