Twitter is a great service. I mean, who doesn’t love to be constricted to 140 characters when they want to say something? Less is more, after all. And the less room you have to say in one tweet, the more you have to say in several, which means the more time you have to spend using Twitter.
What makes Twitter popular?
The activity level is part of what makes Twitter so attractive to businesses. Another important factor is that everything anyone says on Twitter is free to be read by anyone. This makes it extremely easy for businesses to do market research, see what you love and what you hate, or otherwise build tools (like social crm) with little hassle to monitor what’s being said, or interact with those of us on twitter. The constant activity on Twitter combined with Twitter’s openness is part of what’s helped Twitter’s widespread adoption.
Is 140 characters enough?
Twitter is a content ecosystem built from too much free time during lunch and a lot of link sharing in an effort to build more traffic to your own endeavors. While this may benefit Twitter because the purpose of you being there is less about friend activity (like Facebook), I think Twitter’s content may actually be sub-par.
Yes, there are some instances where more in depth conversations take place on Twitter, but they are fragmented to say the least (they can’t not be). Then there are smaller utilities that Twitter is used for, but I would bet these activities are a small percentage of activity on Twitter.
Facebook needs to open specific content to be viewable by everyone.
Enter Facebook, Twitter’s fat older brother. Yes Facebook has more features, a bunch of spammy applications (which are more relevant to me than auto-follow floods from Twitter), and a team that never seems to be satisfied with their interface design. But Facebook also has legitimate conversations and tons of content being created by its users in the form of shared videos, links, photos, wall posts, notes, quizes, profile updates, statuses (tweet tweet!), and comments.
This leads to the quality of content on Facebook being of much higher value, and if Facebook gives open access to all that content in the same way Twitter allows, that will revitalize (and maybe even monetize) the social network. This isn’t something that can be done overnight, obviously, due to Facebook’s terms of use, and simply how the social network has worked thus far. But it is probably the most valuable thing they can press on towards, and they are. It’s just a matter of time until Facebook opens up big, garnering more adoption from businesses, and business-oriented services.
But don’t you think that there are privacy issues at stake when you consider opening up certain areas of Facebook to a wider audience?
@Matt: how are those privacy concerns any different than what people post on twitter? People continue to post openly on both services and believe that only their friends are going to be interested. At least with facebook, you have some level of control.
Woops, sorry! Got carried away with the comments on brazen careerist, I forgot to comment here : )
I agree with Johnnie. The same concerns realistically should be applied to Twitter. It’s a matter of them being over looked strictly because Facebook has traditionally been closed.
But yes, there are privacy issues Facebook will have to address, and has been in the process of doing so for some months (all their democratic stuff for their TOS).
[...] month I wrote a post on why Facebook should open up, and mentioned some of the subsequent benefits of doing so. Well, last week Facebook made [...]