Twitter and Facebook are duking it out to own the future of the social Web, though users won't have noticed. Indeed, for those who use both, this may come as a surprise, since the two, while both social media platforms, seem to serve very different purposes.
Tell that to Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly have painted big bull's-eyes on each other.
Facebook groks this more than Twitter, which is why your mom/dad, teenage neighbors, and friends all use Facebook, and probably don't use Twitter.
Both companies have open APIs that encourage third-party developers to build out their respective platforms. Facebook has the Open Stream API; Twitter, the ">Open API Service.
These are critical components of a platform strategy, but they're secondary to the lesson that Microsoft and Apple have taught us: if users don't care about the front end of software/services, developers won't care about the back end of the same.
Facebook largely works because people know how and why to use it. Twitter...not so much.
It's telling that Twitter's "big" feature of the last six months is...lists. I use and love Twitter, but after a month I still can't get myself excited about creating or following Twitter lists. I'm not even sure why I'd want to do so.
Is this the best Twitter can do?
This is perhaps why Twitter seems to work for a narrow class of user: Caucasian, middle-aged urbanites with no kids.
In other words, not teens, not your mom/dad, and probably not you.
Facebook's demographics look very different, probably because its current range of uses is very different.
To me, this is a user-interface problem, and not a defect in the DNA of the Twitter platform. It's simply not immediately obvious what one should do with Twitter. That's not the case with Facebook.
We learned this long ago in open source. What separates a good but doomed project from a truly great project is documentation (to help developers know how to use the system) and user interface (to help end users know how to deploy the software). That's why Linux was interesting but not ubiquitous until Red Hat, IBM, and others added the finish that made its power usable by the general business world.
Twitter has a lot of promise, but not yet much polish.
It's nice that New York gangs have found new ways to dis each other using Twitter. It will be better when Twitter makes it easy and obvious for me to talk with my parents using Twitter.
Google is apparently "getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties," according to TechCrunch, the latest signal being the automatic creation of a Google account when opening a YouTube account.
It's a clever, almost Microsoft-esque move designed to make Google the center of our social universe. It can't happen fast enough. But Google shouldn't stop with its own properties.
The social Web is currently a morass of mostly siloed choices. I can be on Facebook but also have to build a profile on LinkedIn, not to mention Digg, Slashdot, Bebo, Classmates.com, etc., etc. While we've seen marginal linkage start to form between these through initiatives such as OpenSocial, they don't get nearly far enough toward the one-stop social experience most of us want on the Web.
Yes, choice is good, so sometimes we assume a dizzying array of choices must be very good. Not so.
As I've argued before (PDF), what we need is not a myriad of choices but rather a limited, manageable set of quality choices. Markets trend toward such choice naturally by eliminating weak players and elevating strong competitors.
This is as it should be.
Fearful as I am of any one vendor controlling my Web experience, as Microsoft did for decades in desktop computing, I'm almost equally fearful of a disjointed Web experience that never really hits its stride because users are hamstrung among different social Web sites.
I want the Web to be just that: a connecting web, not an isolating one.
So, dominate me, Google. You've been a good steward of data and user experience thus far, albeit not without hiccups. Find some way to pull in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social data to my Google profile. Just ask: I'll give it to you. I have better things to do than waste time schlepping between different social Web sites. Save me the bother.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Back in 1997 I read Robert Putnam's classic "Bowling Alone" for the first time. In his original thesis, Putnam argues that society has frayed, with people going through the motions of sociability...without actually socializing:
Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities. [He] draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues.
Perhaps the Web can help.
All it takes is one look at the blogging phenomenon to see that something is going on. It's not strange that an (apparently) opinionated loudmouth like myself blogs. It is strange to see normally shy or reserved people blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, etc., and I follow a wide range of people that fit this description.
This is one of the most intriguing things about the Web today. It is enabling speech that would normally be muted at best, nonexistent at worst.
Perhaps it's our way of sending a collective "message in a bottle," reminding the world that we're here and that, despite our individual shyness, we want to be heard and connect with others.
For example, my natural disposition is to expect that people have much better things to do than to hang out and/or talk with me, and hence to spend more time than I'd prefer alone. Through Twitter, however, I've come to know friends like @ZUrlocker, @p1lonn, and even my neighbor @bryce much better, and have grown more confident that they actually want to talk to me offline, because of our conversations online. (Guys, don't burst this bubble! :-)
In this way, Facebook and its ilk may actually help us to "bowl together," rather than alone.
It's not about the sheer number of "friends" that one can accumulate online, but rather the basic communication that increasingly takes place online, rather than offline, that makes the Web a unifying force, helping us to find just a few of the "hundred billion castaways looking for a home."
- prev
- 1
- next
