Facebook Flips The Switch On Real-Time Search, Goes After Twitter Where It Hurts | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Flips The Switch On Real-Time Search, Goes After Twitter Where It Hurts

techcrunch.com

14 pointsvaksel4 comments

I'm sorry, and I think I'm not the only one that feels this way, but facebook is pretty much completely dead to me. Twitter has supplanted it.

Twitter is great for exactly the reason that most people hate it. It fills the void while I'm sitting in line at Fry's or something; I can immediately see what some of my friends are doing simply by looking at my blackberry, as well as give them totally pointless updates like "omg I HATE THE LINES AT FRY'S!" (you can see all of my stupid, inane tweets here: http://www.twitter.com/blhack).

Facebook also just feels like there is too much going on...twitter does exactly one thing and it does it very well.

For instance, I have a really fantastic pocket knife that a good friend bought me a few years ago. It has all sorts of tools, one of them is a screwdriver. Needless to say, it is not as good as...well...a screw drive. Facebook's status updates, and twitter's "tweets", while similar, just aren't really the same thing.

Finally, there are a few people that I "stalk" on twitter that most likely have no idea who I am. One of them is a Poet from the UK...I get to see things like "I am release a few limited edition first run CDs from my original demo...get them while they're hot" (he is actually a rapper...but got started doing poetry jams. I feel dirty saying I follow a rapper). There is somebody called "Yuffster" (I thinks she is a famous dev of some sort? I don't know there was a post on here a while ago of "must-follow" twitterers and she was one of them...actually she was the ONLY one I kept following, everybody else tweeted like 100 times a day.)

Sorry, facebook, but you have lost my eyeballs. Twitter offers a superior (and pretty much completely different) product.

Twitter and Facebook are targeting different needs and communities, whether they know it or not. With Facebook you can find out what your friends are doing, but not much else. This is great for people who have a small and cohesive social network that largely communicates among its own members (e.g. young people.) Twitter is more of a broadcasting platform; you can learn what your friends (and random people you follow) are eating for breakfast, but you can also get the latest news out of Iran or the most recent viral meme that everyone will be blogging about tomorrow. Everyone seems to think "real-time updates" is a single category, but Twitter and Facebook each seem to be better at different facets of this info stream and I am not sure that either will make much of an inroad into the other one's turf.

I don't want to search what my sister ate this morning, I find more important what peers are working on and what they have to say about new technologies or even tech trivia.

Twitter wins.

Twitter wins for you. A critical distinction. I don't see the value in Twitter on its own, especially for a technical audience. Why not just use RSS feeds? Facebook's network is its major appeal, and that applies to everyone, not just techies.

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