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Twitter will never be the new facebook for a very simple reason: Facebook is conceived so that people that have nothing of interesting to say (a huge percentage
by antirez 17y ago
Twitter will never be the new facebook for a very simple reason: Facebook is conceived so that people that have nothing of interesting to say (a huge percentage, sadly) can still tell a lot of useless things, post photos, take a quiz, comment some stupid thing about the status of somebody else.
Twitter instead is designed for people that have something to say (otherwise no-one will follow you given that there is no the reciprocal bit) and are even able to say it in 140 chars.
As a twitter user I'm very glad of this, since I hope that staying an elite thing twitter will continue to be interesting and worth to use. My claim is that also twitter owners should be happy about this. In the long run it can be more interesting to have 1% of the users but with good content than 99% of users that don't pay a dollar and produce things that are not of interest.
- gaius 17y agoThat is complete nonsense. People may have nothing interesting to say to you but photos, events, statuses etc are interesting to their friends. And this is easy to prove: Facebook is one of the stickiest websites around, people keep coming back, whereas as the article points out, Twitter users rapidly lose interest. And that's because Twitter is for people who don't have enough to say to sustain an actual blog.
- req2 17y agoThey lose interest because Twitter is more of a tool than an activity, and Facebook serves to fill all activity and tool roles it can fill.
- GrandMasterBirt 17y agoA tool to do what? Get some hype from bored-at-work followers?
- Tichy 17y agoI've never really used facebook much, but the few facebook friends I have (who are friends in real life, but live far away) seem to confirm the claim of the original comment: 90% of their "status updates" result from some Facebook game or other "take a quiz", "ten things you didn't know about me" and so on. The 90% are taken straight from the Twitter study, so they must be true.
- GrandMasterBirt 17y agoA 140 character message is not always enough to give a complete thought. Complete thought-based communication is more important than bursts of small messages that give rise to the digg bar and cause the craving for more and more communication because you are not really getting true interaction with the other person. On the other hand I love how someone posted on facebook that they are going on vacation and had their house broken into since people knew no one was there. O well Twitter and Facebook still baffle me, no idea why people use them.