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Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Regarding monetization: Twi

Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Regarding monetization: Twitter creates a lot of value - but its hard to monetize because the value is primarily positive externalities. News media benefits by publishing news on twitter, celebs reach their fans, politicians use it as a campaign tool. And Twitter makes very little from all this. The irony: while telcos are fighting hard to avoid becoming commoditized dumb pipes; Twitter by design are a dumb pipe ferrying tweets.

deleted 10y ago
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huherto 10y ago
> Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Your political network ? Fans network ? In which case, it is most useful for celebrities or wannabes but not for regular people.
- noir-york 10y ago
  Indeed. If twitter is for news, then the people who create the "news" - politicians, celebs, artists, journos - are the foundation of the network. Most of us live mundane lives and while events in our lives may be news to friends (marriage/births/etc) there is already a network to share that kinda news: fbk.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hathawsh 10y ago
I saw an article not long ago that clarified for me what Twitter is: it's the community for journalism. It's the perfect place for journalists to quickly pick up the current vibe on a given topic, then repackage what they learn as a news story. Here is what journalists are learning now about Twitter: https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter/ https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter... Lots of people fancy themselves as part-time journalists, so the community of journalists is much larger than people who have the job title. I am a Twitter community member because I see myself as a part-time journalist. As I see it, Facebook is trying to become your daily newspaper, but I think Twitter has a better chance of achieving that goal, because differences in the way Twitter and Facebook treat privacy mean that Twitter can theoretically draw upon a much larger body of content. Twitter ought to consider using a news feed prioritization algorithm similar to Facebook, since Facebook is turning out to be rather good at showing me what I care to see and pushing down the chaff. Twitter still makes me wade through it all. In short, I think Twitter should focus on being better at what it already is: the central gathering place for journalism.
- noir-york 10y ago
  Twitter is useful to break "news" of public relevance: be it a natural disaster, political news, celeb news etc. Personal news like new job, birth, marriage, etc already has a network: FBK. > the central gathering place for journalism. An unmoderated place of journalism. The difficulty lies in the interesting development of news outlets increasingly moderating their boards or disabling them completely for certain posts to combat abuse by trolls, racists, etc, the very problem Twitter has not been seen to do much to counter.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    The difficulty, of course, is reducing the amount of abuse against people without reducing the amount of discourse. Twitter is having serious issues figuring that out.
AlexandrB 10y ago
> Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Twitter communities are formed by people with similar interests or opinions. This was THE promise of the internet at some point in the past - communication with people all over the world. Why is it beneficial to limit our communities to geographic or otherwise circumstantial boundaries which we often have little control over?
- vertex-four 10y ago
  I'll point out that before the whole Web 2.0 and "social networking" thing happened, we had... forums. Which were actually communities. You would actually recognise names, grow a connection with people, probably wind up messaging them through PM systems and maybe getting their Messenger handles. Now, to replace forums, we have... Reddit and Hacker News. Where even though you might recognise nicknames once in a while, you're unlikely to PM them, and in the case of HN that's actively impossible. And so people desire some system which gives them some sense of community, which Twitter (along with Tumblr, and a couple of other sites) gives them.
vidarh 10y ago
Facebook is conversation. Twitter is broadcast. Sometimes they intersect, and conversation happen on Twitter, or "broadcast" happens on Facebook, but there is at least a different social expectation about engagement, for better or for worse Personally, as someone relatively asocial, this is why I prefer Twitter. Ironically, because of the reduced social expectations, I end up having more conversations of Twitter than on Facebook. Facebook simply gets too "personal" for me; I don't want everything I post to start a conversation (and on Twitter it doesn't nearly as often) - I'm just throwing it out there for whomever might find it interesting. On one hand this makes advertising trickier. On the other hand, I think advertising weaved into the content is more accepted on Twitter than facebook, and maybe they will manage to leverage that over time.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Can't you do something like broadcast on Facebook with pages or something that have commenting disabled? Or it just usually doesn't work out? Just curious.

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huherto 10y ago

> Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Your political network ? Fans network ? In which case, it is most useful for celebrities or wannabes but not for regular people.

noir-york 10y ago
Indeed. If twitter is for news, then the people who create the "news" - politicians, celebs, artists, journos - are the foundation of the network. Most of us live mundane lives and while events in our lives may be news to friends (marriage/births/etc) there is already a network to share that kinda news: fbk.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

hathawsh 10y ago

I saw an article not long ago that clarified for me what Twitter is: it's the community for journalism. It's the perfect place for journalists to quickly pick up the current vibe on a given topic, then repackage what they learn as a news story. Here is what journalists are learning now about Twitter: https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter/ https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter... Lots of people fancy themselves as part-time journalists, so the community of journalists is much larger than people who have the job title. I am a Twitter community member because I see myself as a part-time journalist. As I see it, Facebook is trying to become your daily newspaper, but I think Twitter has a better chance of achieving that goal, because differences in the way Twitter and Facebook treat privacy mean that Twitter can theoretically draw upon a much larger body of content. Twitter ought to consider using a news feed prioritization algorithm similar to Facebook, since Facebook is turning out to be rather good at showing me what I care to see and pushing down the chaff. Twitter still makes me wade through it all. In short, I think Twitter should focus on being better at what it already is: the central gathering place for journalism.

noir-york 10y ago
Twitter is useful to break "news" of public relevance: be it a natural disaster, political news, celeb news etc. Personal news like new job, birth, marriage, etc already has a network: FBK. > the central gathering place for journalism. An unmoderated place of journalism. The difficulty lies in the interesting development of news outlets increasingly moderating their boards or disabling them completely for certain posts to combat abuse by trolls, racists, etc, the very problem Twitter has not been seen to do much to counter.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  The difficulty, of course, is reducing the amount of abuse against people without reducing the amount of discourse. Twitter is having serious issues figuring that out.

AlexandrB 10y ago

> Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Twitter communities are formed by people with similar interests or opinions. This was THE promise of the internet at some point in the past - communication with people all over the world. Why is it beneficial to limit our communities to geographic or otherwise circumstantial boundaries which we often have little control over?

vertex-four 10y ago
I'll point out that before the whole Web 2.0 and "social networking" thing happened, we had... forums. Which were actually communities. You would actually recognise names, grow a connection with people, probably wind up messaging them through PM systems and maybe getting their Messenger handles. Now, to replace forums, we have... Reddit and Hacker News. Where even though you might recognise nicknames once in a while, you're unlikely to PM them, and in the case of HN that's actively impossible. And so people desire some system which gives them some sense of community, which Twitter (along with Tumblr, and a couple of other sites) gives them.

vidarh 10y ago

Facebook is conversation. Twitter is broadcast. Sometimes they intersect, and conversation happen on Twitter, or "broadcast" happens on Facebook, but there is at least a different social expectation about engagement, for better or for worse Personally, as someone relatively asocial, this is why I prefer Twitter. Ironically, because of the reduced social expectations, I end up having more conversations of Twitter than on Facebook. Facebook simply gets too "personal" for me; I don't want everything I post to start a conversation (and on Twitter it doesn't nearly as often) - I'm just throwing it out there for whomever might find it interesting. On one hand this makes advertising trickier. On the other hand, I think advertising weaved into the content is more accepted on Twitter than facebook, and maybe they will manage to leverage that over time.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Can't you do something like broadcast on Facebook with pages or something that have commenting disabled? Or it just usually doesn't work out? Just curious.