4 ms·

as opposed to the general view, i think the new ui is an attempt to compete w/ twitter's ui

• unalone 17y ago
  Get it out of your head that Facebook is competing with Twitter. Facebook is enormous compared to Twitter, and it and Twitter overlap on only a small subset of features. Fact is, right now Facebook doesn't have to compete with anybody. In what they do, they're ahead of everybody else by margins that are almost baffling. Hell, the closest they come to having a competitor is Google against Facebook's Bing ads. I think that what's happening is more simply that Facebook saw Twitter had something cool, and instead of making a set of features that were similar but slightly different in irritating ways to set itself aside, it took Twitter's ideas wholesale and credited them instantly. But that has nothing to do with Facebook Lite, which is targeting people with slower computers.
  • ashishk 17y ago
    Get it out of your head that Facebook is competing with Twitter. Please note I said they're competing with twitters ui, which is different from competing with twitter. That said, I think facebook is competing with twitter's growth rate. Not in absolute figures but relative. The fact is, twitter is growing faster than facebook did in its early years. and no one knows better than facebook how a smart team can build a business out of early momentum.
  • johns 17y ago
    If you believe the line that this is just to target slower connections/computers, I have a car here to sell you. You may be right (I happen to think differently) that they're not trying to compete with Twitter, but it seems clear to me that they want to be Twitter and be the darling of the web again. I think Twitter has achieved mainstream notoriety that Facebook envies and they're doing whatever they can to try to get themselves into the position Twitter is in. If that means trying to sway heavy Twitter users with a UI more to their liking, then that's what they'll do.
    • unalone 17y ago
      Facebook doesn't want to be the darling. They want to polish their services up, which is why they took Twitter's idea of life updates and removed their selective feed. But they don't need media attention. They're perhaps the most important site on the planet. Ask somebody between 14-22 which they'd rather life without, Google or Facebook, and they'll go Facebook. Yesterday I met, for the first time, a girl that thinks Facebook is the whole Internet. She uses it for searching and mailing... everything. Apparently there are a lot of people who do that. Facebook is enormous, and it gets missed by a lot of people like us in the tech scene, because we don't think about just how tech-illiterate most people are.