Why Facebook Can't Become Twitter: Its Closed Nature | Hacker News Reader

Why Facebook Can't Become Twitter: Its Closed Nature

techdirt.com

21 pointspeter12315 comments

This post seems to assume that Facebook wants to be more like Twitter, without bothering to support that. Let's take a look:

- Facebook likely has 20-30x the number of users that Twitter does, despite only being a couple years older.

- Facebook brings in hundreds of millions in revenue; Twitter brings in zero.

- Facebook is composed of real people, many of which have rich and deep connections in real life. A comparatively large percentage of the users on Twitter are corporations, marketers, and spammers.

- Facebook has tens of thousands of applications on its platform; Twitter has hundreds.

- Facebook has raised hundreds of millions on valuations in the billions; Twitter has raised tens of millions on valuations in the hundreds of millions.

- Facebook has twice the retention rate that Twitter does.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of both services, but this post is a clear example of being blinded by the latest hype (and yes, I'm aware that Facebook is high on hype as well).

MySpace had 20-30x the number of users that Facebook did not so long ago.

Looks like you'd have to go back to 2006, but yes, that was the case not too long ago.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace.com,facebook.com&...

Dumb question, but doesn't Google Trends cover searches, not traffic on the actual domain? Are we just assuming that the ratio of searches:traffic is pretty much the same for both sites?

Yes, you're absolutely right. I made that assumption, and justified it by seeing that Compete's numbers matched up well for the past 12 months (Compete unfortunately only goes back 1 year, hence I went to Google Trends).

That's a fair point. I still think that Facebook is in a much better long-term position than Twitter.

You forgot:

- Facebook has the talented engineers. Twitter might have a few now, but didn't have any in the past.

Citation needed.

It makes me sad that a post that portrays every employee of a company negatively without citing any sources gets modded up here. "Haha, Twitter has a fail whale, they all suck!!11" sounds like Digg, not HN.

There was a screenshot a few months ago showing the debug version of twitter which showed that each page request needed about 12 mysql queries... that's proof enough that they didn't have any talented engineering talent. Their business guys and designers were however top. But hey, at the end it worked out all very well :-)

Next up on HN:

Why an Orange Can't Become an Apple: Its tough orange skin

Next week's article:

How Facebook Can Become Twitter: Open up

I mean come on, it would be a weekend project to allow public posts and "follow" instead of just "add as friend".

The real interesting part is if Facebook/Twitter can actually make money.

Become a "fan" of a Facebook page = "follow"

Really? In the course of about a month and a half Facebook has caught up on nearly every single feature that makes Twitter distinct and interesting. I haven't seen a compelling reason to think that they won't be able to finish the job and go even further than what Twitter is capable of in the future.

Great, so Twitter is different from Facebook because Facebook is "closed".

I don't see an argument re: which is more desirable (to the common user) though, an open system or a closed one. Without that argument, this article is mostly useless and uninteresting.

Facebook - self-updating Rolodex

Twitter - real-time news

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