Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

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False. Twitter has nothing on Facebook. Here's why:

1. Twitter has nothing to do with early adopters anymore...they were on freaking Oprah.

2. They've been around for 3.5 years, which is only a couple years less than Facebook, so it's not like they're this little upstart that's trying to unseat the ancient Facebook.

3. Facebook has way more retention and engagement / user.

4. Facebook does what Twitter does (status updates), and does it better, IMO.

5. My parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents all use Facebook. They find value in it, and it enriches their life. Twitter is useless to them.

6. Twitter now is mostly marketers and spammers, judging from the people trying to follow me.

7. Most people seem to talk on Twitter way more than they listen. Over time, this drives down engagement, which means that people have to talk louder and more often to get any attention.

8. Most importantly, Facebook has hundreds of millions in annual revenue, and is predicting cashflow positive in 2010. Twitter has yet to make a dollar (to my knowledge).

EDIT: Added a few more points

> Facebook does what Twitter does (status updates), and does it better, IMO.

Twitter actually does it better -- but, because Twitter doesn't do anything else, everything on Twitter goes into the "status update" interface, which results in severe clutter. In short, Twitter's status update functionality is better, but the social effects on it are damaging enough to make Facebook actually better suited to status updating in practice.

It's sort of an academic quibble, I guess, but sometimes those are the most fun.

Agreed on all points. I'm using the term "status update" as a catch-all to include everything that Twitter is used for, which is inaccurate. I stand corrected :)

Very good arguments! Twitter certainly has too many mult-level/affiliate marketers and spammers. I've noticed that on Facebook, too, I'm afraid. But on Twitter they can simply start following you. That's probably why they're more noticable. On Facebook connection has to be a two-way agreement.

On the Oprah point: Oprah was a very recent event. Not sure it's had a long enough time to make an impact. And adoption of Twitter has gone up significantly since that spot.

Not sure it's had a long enough time to make an impact. And adoption of Twitter has gone up significantly since that spot.

Umm... :)

Regardless, it's been more than four months since that point, which is around 10% of Twitter's total life.

Ahhh, Internet time -- a hoary old tradition, skewing our perceptions of newness since 1993.

Professional tennis players and bicyclists with no interest in the technology themselves pay people to maintain Twitter accounts for them. I think that pretty much fits the definition of "majority adoption".

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