Ev Williams was quoted recently saying, “The world is big enough for both Facebook and Twitter”, almost as though we were supposed to think Twitter wasn’t trying to be a competitor. Don’t be fooled though, Twitter’s recent lists feature is just one step towards providing the privacy controls Facebook itself is known for. Before we know it you will be able to decide which lists you want to share Tweets with, photo services will be integrated, video, groups, messaging, and more, and Twitter will be head-to-head with the features Facebook currently provides. Twitter wants to go head-to-head with Facebook. There’s no doubt in my mind that’s what Twitter is trying to do – it’s what they have to do in order to continue growing. While Facebook’s weakness is the lack of full openness, Twitter has the greater weakness of lack of control or privacy. Without more than just public status updates their sign ups and traffic will plateau and the service will dwindle and lose value.
Yet, with each update to Twitter comes increased pressure to Facebook to become more open and more public. Just today, in response to Twitter’s partnerships with Bing and Google, Facebook also shared that it was opening up its own public status updates to be indexed by search engines. Don’t forget that Facebook already has an ad deal with Microsoft, along with investment.
Facebook’s Lack of Openness is an Illusion
Despite the criticism against Facebook for not being open don’t be fooled. Not only is your data capable of being open, but you get to control what is, and what isn’t open at the same time. As of today all your status updates set to go to “Everyone” (check your privacy settings) can now be indexed by search engines. Expect this to also open up on Facebook itself, along with Facebook’s own search. Facebook wants to be open – its users have to choose to be open first though.
Facebook’s recent hiring of David Recordon (note that the linked article is by Chris Messina, also a leader in Open Standards technology) is a testament to this I think. Recordon was one of the leading proponents to open standards and data portability before joining Facebook, and he has been put in charge of just that at Facebook. With this hire, Facebook has just become a leader in this space. Notice Facebook’s adoption of the ActivityStrea.ms standard, and open sourcing of the Tornado framework acquired from FriendFeed. Add to that the many other open technologies you can find on their developers site – Facebook is not a follower in this space! Where is Twitter’s Open Source tools page?
Facebook Fan Pages
Let’s add to that Facebook Fan Pages. Each and every Fan Page is indexable by Google. While better integration with personal profiles is still necessary, this is an excellent way to share news and information in the same manner you do Twitter, and build a community at the same time. Each post is threaded so you can build a conversation with your community. Each comment, “Fanning”, and post to the Page gets posted to a user’s friends as well, further encouraging conversation and discussion. This is far from what Twitter offers, and all this is done in a very open fashion – you don’t have to be on Facebook to read the contents of a Fan Page.
I just started building my own Fan Page community (send “fan stay” to 32665 (FBOOK) on your phone), and am already seeing greater interaction there the more I spend using it. The potential is very strong in a very open, and much stronger environment than Twitter.
Facebook’s Terms of Service are Open Too
Now, let’s talk Terms. Earlier this year Facebook instituted a new policy stating that any changes to the Terms of Service will be put up to the users. If enough users disagree, it gets put up for vote by the users. If a majority of those users vote for the changes, they get put in place. If not, they don’t. The current terms are established in such a manner.
Consumerist has a great overview of what these terms changes were. To summarize, you own your content, and give Facebook the right to distribute that content (this is so they can share it with your friends legally) so long as you are a member of Facebook. HOWEVER, the minute you quit the site, the terms state that your information at that point is removed, with exception to the photos, videos, etc. that have already been loaded into your friends’ streams. This is so the stream remains in tact. There’s termination here.
Let’s contrast that with Twitter, whose terms have no termination and are just as strong, if not stronger. With Twitter, when you leave the site your content can remain. There is nothing in Twitter’s terms stating that they have to remove your content when you leave. You give Twitter that license to your content forever. Where’s the outcry about that? Yet Facebook had huge outcry over not having such termination in their agreement. Facebook has remained open and ahead of Twitter even in this regard.
Facebook’s Acquisition of FriendFeed
I think this is the crown jewel we have yet to see. We know the FriendFeed team is working on Facebook as we speak. We also know FriendFeed.com is not going away. Will Facebook have FriendFeed-like real-time features? Will FriendFeed see more Facebook integration? The one weakness of Facebook is the lack of an easy way for those that want to be public by default (which is dangerous) to be public, while integrating that information with the user profile and other integrated parts of Facebook. Search still lacks a public interface. There’s no API to it. Facebook’s stream is still not real-time while Twitter’s and FriendFeeds are.
The FriendFeed team has the potential to change this. I predict a real-time Facebook in the near future, with integrated public interfaces and search enabling users to share the content they want to share with the world. The cool thing is Twitter has already exposed their cards with Lists. Funny thing is Facebook has had lists for over a year now, and you can even filter searches with those lists! Twitter doesn’t have that. The only benefit Twitter’s lists give is the ability to see who other people are subscribing to and subscribe to the same. I don’t see that as being that hard of a problem to tackle for Facebook. They’ve seen Twitter’s cards and no one has seen Facebook’s. Imagine the ability to put Fan Pages into public lists, for instance – I think that would be pretty cool, and pretty easy to implement. Imagine Facebook’s own privacy controls, including the “public option” available for Lists as well as users and Pages. It’s also important to note that FriendFeed also had lists before Twitter did. The combination of both FriendFeed’s and Facebook’s teams means they are the true experts on lists. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
My Point
So what’s my point? My point is stop drinking the Twitter Kool-Aid! Yeah, it has its place – I’m NOT saying get off Twitter, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as what Facebook already offers. I want to see more news people and early adopters like Scoble and Louis Gray and Steve Rubel using Facebook and Facebook lists to provide content and news. I want to see more people sharing and discussing content in my own Facebook feeds. I want to see more people utilizing privacy controls, not available in Twitter, to segregate the content they share, reducing the noise. Spend some time in Facebook – learn what you can and can’t do with it. Try to build a community there and see how effective it is, utilizing all these tools at once.
Facebook is not losing this war. With 10 million fans a day and growing on Facebook Pages alone, 300-350 million users and growing, a much more powerful API and developer ecosystem, Twitter doesn’t even make a dent in what Facebook is doing. It’s about time we start giving credit where credit is due. Twitter launching lists is about as effective in fighting Facebook as this video of Ben Parr is in fighting Chad Vader 😉 :
Image courtesy LDS.org
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I didn't realized Facebook bought Friendfeed. Lots of new possibilties for both sides. I don't use Facebook as much as Twitter. After reading your points I will have to start promoting myself more on Facebook. I don't like being an open book of details yet that is how I feel with Facebook .
Jesse,
Great David and Goliath imagery and details.. I am putting my money on the “Facebook Goliath” in this battle… literally!
Excellent post, Jesse!!! You totally have this Facebook thing *down*!!! heheeee. Glad to see you kicking your fan page up a notch – nice job! And way to go securing a 4-letter vanity – sweet!!!!
Jesse for me part of openess means that I own my social network list, and can freely share to any content I create or store at a site. I can use the data however I wish by embedding part of it on other sites far from a host site. I'm not confident Facebook is as open as you claim, sure you can search my stream, but if facebook goes away, or changes its rules, I can't simply walk away with all my contact info in tact. I can't “backup” my social network on my local system or elsewhere on the cloud.
Actually just had some discussions with friends on how we rarely even use Facebook anymore and now its all about Twitter. Yesterday my 18 year old daughter, a My Space fan who slowly and reluctantly moved over to Facebook only because her friends did, came up to me and said “You know what Dad?, I hate to admit it, but Twitter is kind of cool!” I'm seeing a lot of business models being built on Twitter especially on using the true benefit of Twitter – on driving offline monetization – (i.e. Tweetups) but don't see that much via Facebook. My money (literally) is on Twitter.
PS – i found this article via your Twitter feed 😉
Yes, you are Bruce!
Lynette, be sure to take advantage of your privacy settings. Facebook gives
you much more control over those details than Twitter does. Get to know
what you can do with it – it is very powerful!
Thanks Mari! I have a few connections 😉 I decided it was time to start
spending more time on my Facebook Page – Twitter just isn't doing it for me,
and already I'm starting to see results by focusing more on the Page. I
have to admit you inspired me a bit in that. Thanks for all your support
and help!
Mark, all that stuff is available via the API – nothing is stopping you as a
user from retrieving that. Check out the app
http://apps.facebook.com/rssnewsfeedreader/ and you can even get an RSS feed
for your news feed. Per the TOS, you own that information, and Facebook's
license on that information is revoked at the time you quit the site. With
Twitter that license never terminates.
Joseph, there's only so far Twitter can go with plain status updates.
Facebook has those. The only way Twitter will be able to grow to the size
of Facebook is by adding new features, and when that happens people will
realize they can get the same thing and more from Facebook. People saying
it's “cool” simply means it's a fad. My money (literally) is in Facebook,
and that's founded by concrete results. Good luck making money on Twitter
though.
If Twitter tries to compete with Facebook, then it will become a fail to me. Twitter strength is and always will be its simplicity. I have a Facebook account, but still find it confusing at times.
Twitter's problem is that as just a status update company they can only grow
so much. The more Facebook simplifies, the more people will just use
Facebook to do that. So Twitter has to do something – do they compete
against Facebook? Personally, I'd rather just manage it all under one
network if the opportunity were presented.
That's why I have to keep up with your blog. Much has changed with facebook in the past year. I'd really like to get a comfortable feeling for the API, certainly for developing personalized content filters.
Thanks Jesse.
Mark, check out the filter tables in FQL for the API. There are some cool
things you can do with that.
Before I begin digging in to facebook too much, I'll make sure to snag your book 😉
in the meantime we support rss, so I'll point interested users to the app you suggested.
My money is literally in people. We are the core of any site or places value. Making real connections with people has trumped social site lifespans time and again.
On the flipside, developing for platforms that fade is costly, but at least beyond the interface, there's plenty of functionality we can take with us no matter where the information comes from.
Hope both you and Joseph both make out though 🙂
I get confused as to what service we really can't get from software and Internet pipelines. Functionally facebook is fairly rich, but a large proportion of Americans aren't regular users of the service. Email is still the most prevelant social network, but building email apps, has had limited appeal (all the platforms/clients are too diverse).
So there's this gravitational pull to a single platform to focus developers, while at the same time this repulsive force of open decentralized data exchange and foster independent innovation.
I see the open protocol with the common interface winning out here but with centralized focus hubs of data. Something like the wordpress + disqus/echo model. I suppose Disqus could be mimicked with open software (single login across blogs), and comment aggregators could form based on their value. Maybe wave could succeed here, maybe Rss, but likely they'll be multiple protocols and methods of conversion between them.
The old software design philosophy of common data structures with customized views comes to mind. We need the best set of building blocks to help this technological evolution proceed towards higher efficiency and effectiveness. Identifying those fundamental best blocks is nontrivial though. Where did the amino acids of life originate from? Understanding this could aid in technological development.
Mark, I think the more you learn about it, the more you'll realize Facebook
is open in the sense of the Disqus/Wordpress model. You can pull every
single Facebook connection onto your own website and link your own users
automatically using Facebook's APIs and tools. You get to own the
connections if you choose. Look at how Digg is doing it – any time one of
your friends logs into the Digg app on Facebook they automatically get added
as a friend on Digg. Digg is using the Facebook API to do this.
Mark, if you like people, check out what Huffington post is doing by turning their readers into real people – here's a great recap on the success of what they're doing with Facebook Connect: http://ff.im/-aa27S
Yes, you are Bruce!
Lynette, be sure to take advantage of your privacy settings. Facebook gives
you much more control over those details than Twitter does. Get to know
what you can do with it – it is very powerful!
Thanks Mari! I have a few connections 😉 I decided it was time to start
spending more time on my Facebook Page – Twitter just isn't doing it for me,
and already I'm starting to see results by focusing more on the Page. I
have to admit you inspired me a bit in that. Thanks for all your support
and help!
Mark, all that stuff is available via the API – nothing is stopping you as a
user from retrieving that. Check out the app
http://apps.facebook.com/rssnewsfeedreader/ and you can even get an RSS feed
for your news feed. Per the TOS, you own that information, and Facebook's
license on that information is revoked at the time you quit the site. With
Twitter that license never terminates.
Joseph, there's only so far Twitter can go with plain status updates.
Facebook has those. The only way Twitter will be able to grow to the size
of Facebook is by adding new features, and when that happens people will
realize they can get the same thing and more from Facebook. People saying
it's “cool” simply means it's a fad. My money (literally) is in Facebook,
and that's founded by concrete results. Good luck making money on Twitter
though.
If Twitter tries to compete with Facebook, then it will become a fail to me. Twitter strength is and always will be its simplicity. I have a Facebook account, but still find it confusing at times.
Twitter's problem is that as just a status update company they can only grow
so much. The more Facebook simplifies, the more people will just use
Facebook to do that. So Twitter has to do something – do they compete
against Facebook? Personally, I'd rather just manage it all under one
network if the opportunity were presented.
That's why I have to keep up with your blog. Much has changed with facebook in the past year. I'd really like to get a comfortable feeling for the API, certainly for developing personalized content filters.
Thanks Jesse.
Mark, check out the filter tables in FQL for the API. There are some cool
things you can do with that.
Before I begin digging in to facebook too much, I'll make sure to snag your book 😉
in the meantime we support rss, so I'll point interested users to the app you suggested.
My money is literally in people. We are the core of any site or places value. Making real connections with people has trumped social site lifespans time and again.
On the flipside, developing for platforms that fade is costly, but at least beyond the interface, there's plenty of functionality we can take with us no matter where the information comes from.
Hope both you and Joseph both make out though 🙂
I get confused as to what service we really can't get from software and Internet pipelines. Functionally facebook is fairly rich, but a large proportion of Americans aren't regular users of the service. Email is still the most prevelant social network, but building email apps, has had limited appeal (all the platforms/clients are too diverse).
So there's this gravitational pull to a single platform to focus developers, while at the same time this repulsive force of open decentralized data exchange and foster independent innovation.
I see the open protocol with the common interface winning out here but with centralized focus hubs of data. Something like the wordpress + disqus/echo model. I suppose Disqus could be mimicked with open software (single login across blogs), and comment aggregators could form based on their value. Maybe wave could succeed here, maybe Rss, but likely they'll be multiple protocols and methods of conversion between them.
The old software design philosophy of common data structures with customized views comes to mind. We need the best set of building blocks to help this technological evolution proceed towards higher efficiency and effectiveness. Identifying those fundamental best blocks is nontrivial though. Where did the amino acids of life originate from? Understanding this could aid in technological development.
Mark, I think the more you learn about it, the more you'll realize Facebook
is open in the sense of the Disqus/Wordpress model. You can pull every
single Facebook connection onto your own website and link your own users
automatically using Facebook's APIs and tools. You get to own the
connections if you choose. Look at how Digg is doing it – any time one of
your friends logs into the Digg app on Facebook they automatically get added
as a friend on Digg. Digg is using the Facebook API to do this.
Mark, if you like people, check out what Huffington post is doing by turning their readers into real people – here's a great recap on the success of what they're doing with Facebook Connect: http://ff.im/-aa27S
I get confused as to what service we really can't get from software and Internet pipelines. Functionally facebook is fairly rich, but a large proportion of Americans aren't regular users of the service. Email is still the most prevelant social network, but building email apps, has had limited appeal (all the platforms/clients are too diverse).
So there's this gravitational pull to a single platform to focus developers, while at the same time this repulsive force of open decentralized data exchange and foster independent innovation.
I see the open protocol with the common interface winning out here but with centralized focus hubs of data. Something like the wordpress + disqus/echo model. I suppose Disqus could be mimicked with open software (single login across blogs), and comment aggregators could form based on their value. Maybe wave could succeed here, maybe Rss, but likely they'll be multiple protocols and methods of conversion between them.
The old software design philosophy of common data structures with customized views comes to mind. We need the best set of building blocks to help this technological evolution proceed towards higher efficiency and effectiveness. Identifying those fundamental best blocks is nontrivial though. Where did the amino acids of life originate from? Understanding this could aid in technological development.
My money is literally in people. We are the core of any site or places value. Making real connections with people has trumped social site lifespans time and again.
On the flipside, developing for platforms that fade is costly, but at least beyond the interface, there's plenty of functionality we can take with us no matter where the information comes from.
Hope both you and Joseph both make out though 🙂
Before I begin digging in to facebook too much, I'll make sure to snag your book 😉
in the meantime we support rss, so I'll point interested users to the app you suggested.
Mark, all that stuff is available via the API – nothing is stopping you as a
user from retrieving that. Check out the app
http://apps.facebook.com/rssnewsfeedreader/ and you can even get an RSS feed
for your news feed. Per the TOS, you own that information, and Facebook's
license on that information is revoked at the time you quit the site. With
Twitter that license never terminates.
I get confused as to what service we really can't get from software and Internet pipelines. Functionally facebook is fairly rich, but a large proportion of Americans aren't regular users of the service. Email is still the most prevelant social network, but building email apps, has had limited appeal (all the platforms/clients are too diverse).
So there's this gravitational pull to a single platform to focus developers, while at the same time this repulsive force of open decentralized data exchange and foster independent innovation.
I see the open protocol with the common interface winning out here but with centralized focus hubs of data. Something like the wordpress + disqus/echo model. I suppose Disqus could be mimicked with open software (single login across blogs), and comment aggregators could form based on their value. Maybe wave could succeed here, maybe Rss, but likely they'll be multiple protocols and methods of conversion between them.
The old software design philosophy of common data structures with customized views comes to mind. We need the best set of building blocks to help this technological evolution proceed towards higher efficiency and effectiveness. Identifying those fundamental best blocks is nontrivial though. Where did the amino acids of life originate from? Understanding this could aid in technological development.