A Little Birdie Battles a Big 'Book': Twitter vs. Facebook

by Regina Nigro March 30, 2009

When U.S. Airways Flight 1549 glided safely onto the surface of the Hudson River in January, the media couldn’t get enough of the tale of triumph. The story first broke not from a major media news outlet, but on Twitter, the 140-character microblogging platform.

Twitter user Janis Krums took the first photo of the miraculous landing, uploading the picture with Twitpic and winning himself an interview on MSNBC. Since then, Twitter has exploded in the mainstream media, a far cry from its inauspicious beginnings. In a November 2006 article (eight months after Twitter’s launch) the New York Times barely mentioned Twitter in a profile of its creator, Evan “ev” Williams, dismissively referring to Twitter as a “blogging-like tool for quick updates.”

Twitter’s emergence as a powerful media tool comes at the same time that Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook and posterchild for precocity, faces serious criticism over Facebook’s recent redesign: a design update that has cluttered users’ news feeds (a real-time update of friends’ activity) with gift notifications, quiz results and other flotsam. In the revenue-challenged milieu of Web 2.0, could Twitter conquer Facebook?

Twitter clearly faces a tremendous disadvantage. After three years, Twitter has attracted only six million users; Facebook, by contrast, boasts a staggering 175 million active users. And Twitter’s current reputation as a niche service that is valuable to journalists and commentators raises the question as to whether the competition between both sites is anything more than a media fantasy.

Rachel Sterne, CEO of GroundReport.com, a citizen media platform, sees Facebook as “a utility that connects you to those already in your personal private network,” one that “keeps you in the loop on personal news of those in your social circle.” The Facebook login page bears this out, greeting new visitors with the message: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Facebook is thus a means for mapping a pre-existing social network online whereas Twitter, as Sterne says, “is much more public, a source of general news and often, aspirational. You follow people you aspire to know, like Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears.”

The ability to “follow” (subscribe to a user’s Twitter updates) people you admire, whether it’s Demi Moore or Rachel Maddow or simply a major player in your industry, is one of Twitter’s greatest strengths. While “friending” a stranger on Facebook comes with a heavy social stigma and feels like an encroachment upon someone’s sacred space, Twitter absolutely encourages and runs on the connection between people who have never met. Twitter helps an individual build a social/professional network online rather than simply providing a space to map existing networks.

But this difference, while significant, doesn’t seem to be enough to squash the idea that Facebook and Twitter are competing for the same market space. Freelance journalist Daniel Doyle does view Twitter and Facebook as competitors, pointing out that “[Facebook] was going to buy [Twitter] but didn’t due to valuation problems” (it was widely reported that Facebook offered to buy Twitter for $500 million in December 2008). Before and since then, Facebook has emulated Twitter.

Prior to the recent redesign, Facebook’s status update prompt was “What are you doing right now?”, a thinly-concealed reformulation of Twitter’s “What are you doing?” Further, Doyle notes, “Facebook’s redesign obviously takes some cues from Twitter,” as Facebook has instituted real-time news feed updates to replace the feed that updated only every 10 minutes and made “fan pages” more like actual profiles to allow celebrities to connect easily with their fans, cribbing Twitter’s primary attraction (one that has been fostered in part by Twitter-addict celebrities like Kutcher and Stephen Fry.

So in spite of their differences, it’s clear that Facebook and Twitter at least believe themselves to be in competition. But while Facebook has attempted to generate revenue through ad placement, and Twitter’s Biz Stone told the Wall Street Journal on March 26th that paid “pro accounts” are on the way for Twitter, whether either can monetize their traffic effectively is still open to debate. Sterne thinks both “could draw paying customers, but more so Facebook…Facebook is where our online identity lives, an identity that has taken years to cultivate through personal connections, photographs, notes. Twitter is far more ephemeral, making it more addictive and urgent, but hurting its longterm value and uniqueness.”

But are users, of either Twitter or Facebook, willing to pay for the services they’ve enjoyed for free? Doyle doesn’t think so: “If Twitter started to charge, I think users would just move over to the next most popular free microblogging platform. As for social networks like Facebook, I don’t believe media professionals would ever pay to use one of those either. MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn are free competitors….”

Doyle’s point is a valid one; as many newspapers have come to realize, the spoiled denizens of the web are loath to pay for anything (news, commentary, entertainment) that can be had for free. Michael Langley, assistant news director at News 10 in Sacramento, California, and Twitter columnist for Poynter, affirms that “the quickest way to gut [Twitter's] user base is to charge them.” Langley offers instead a possible solution that involves Twitter “franchising [their] brand to API developers” (API developers are the people responsible for the “gifts” and “drinks” and other virtual tokens that populate your Facebook newsfeed) and says that “at worst, Twitter has the option of placing ads.”

The battle might be won by which service has the greatest cultural impact. Sterne characterizes Twitter as the “new public town square,” and indeed, Twitter has become a kind of bulletin board for the entire Internet. The option to search Twitter through its own interface or through clients like TweetDeck that allow users to set up entire feeds dedicated to one search term or hashtag (a word preceded by the # sign that optimizes search is a throwback to the days of IRC chatting) is something entirely unlike any service that has preceded it.

Doyle, who uses both Facebook and Twitter, says that Twitter “is worth more to me in that it’s not a walled info garden like AOL in the 90s or like how Facebook is now socially speaking. With Twitter, I can meet people I don’t know away from keyboard and that’s not only okay, it’s sort of the point…”

Langley, too, sees Twitter as a powerful tool for connection, one that opens “a new level of communication for people who did not feel they had the time to blog, the patience to vlog or anything interesting to say…Twitter allows people to be at their most natural and then allows them to connect with people in ways they never expected.”

Indeed, while Facebook seems to promote lasting connections with those we already know, Twitter’s ability to facilitate new connections is innovative. Doyle notes that, “on Facebook, you can search for a group of people with the same interest, and try to make friends with some people in that group, but it’s laughably less effective than networking on Twitter. I don’t want to take away from Facebook, because I know Obama used it effectively, but it’s still more of a walled garden. Twitter isn’t.”

Whether this quality makes Twitter more profitable than Facebook remains to be seen, both are still running on venture capital and promise.

Regina Nigro is a freelance writer.

(From: http://www.tooshytostop.com/index.php/2009/03/30/a-little-birdie-battles-a-big-book/)