Facebook vs. Twitter

This shouldn't even be a battle, but Facebook appears to be encroaching on Twitter's status as THE real time social media application. Twitter has little (read: nothing) to fear from this change.

It's clear that Facebook is attempting to update the way it operates to help businesses and advertisers get the same functionality from it that Twitter offers. Offering real-time updates on published items and dropping the friend limit both compete with Twitter's real-time updating and unlimited friend number. Facebook is also making business pages more user-friendly by making them more like user profiles than a unique "page". At face value, it seems like a competition is brewing. There are a few glowing disparities, however.

First, Twitter doesn't offer the same capabilities that Facebook does. Sure, you can forward thoughts, images, videos and share links. But they don't exist permanently in space in the sense that they're posted to an organized board that everyone can see a month from now. It does not function with the same long-term abilities that Facebook has. Don't count it as a bad thing though, there's certainly value in the short-term messaging that Twitter allows.

Second, Facebook doesn't have the same indexing power that Twitter has. I don't know if you've ever used Twitscoop before, but it's pretty awesome for tracking trends and news. It gives you a tagroll from the twitisphere, letting you know which words are popular at the moment. It's actually really helpful, and generally you can put the links together before reading the tweets containing those words. For example, I saw "TO" "Buffalo" and "Bills" the other day get popular all of a sudden. Guess what? The Buffalo Bills picked up TO, and I knew it almost the moment it happened. Sadly, there was no trend for Illinois accepting Pluto as a planet.

Third, in general, Twitter and Facebook are used very differently. I, for example, use Facebook mostly as a private citizen (although MakeSeriously does have a page and a handful of fans) and use Twitter as a networking/trendf-ollowing/search-engining/random tool. Facebook is like home base, and Twitter is like a car. Facebook is comfortable and controllable. Twitter is a bit more spontaneous and I use it to take me places. They can have similar functions, but for now they're still pretty segregated.

So there's no need for Twitter or Facebook to worry, or for anyone to be terribly concerned that either is going away in the future. To see them survive going on in the next couple of years, they will need to learn to play nice; perhaps even partner. They can find mutual benefit from one another, and hopefully constructive cooperation will be the tone, not frantic scrambling to compete with someone who resembles your service.