Facebook ’status’ changes no threat to Twitter
“You can take my status, but you can not take my community”
A post proclaiming Facebook Opens Status API, Say Goodbye to Twitter is good, Techmeme-grabbing stuff but it totally misses the point of why people like Twitter.
Twitter started out as a technology platform but it’s become a way of life.
The majority of people I follow on Twitter aren’t actually ‘friends’ at first. When I click that button that says Follow, I barely know them other than their recent messages. There are exceptions after a meeting in real life, but that’s the rul of thumb. They become friends over time through interesting conversational Tweets.
Facebook’s a different story for me. I won’t add anyone on there that I haven’t met in real life. Facebook is great for sharing intimate personal details with friends but I don’t know many people that use the status field for really regular communication.
That’s not to say that people aren’t trying to turn Facebook status into a conversational tool. A CNN Facebook mashup linked live video streaming of President Obama’s inaguration with a panel for you and your friends to chat in real time using status updates.
Twitter is here for a long time to come because there’s an amazing community on there, and the technology platform is so lightweight that it can evolve over time organically.
Let me know if you liked the post – I’m on Twitter as @philsheard 
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 0 people and commented on 0 times show4 Responses to “Facebook ’status’ changes no threat to Twitter”
Leave a Reply
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter (philsheard)
Flickr (philsheard)
Friendfeed (philsheard)
Last.fm (philsheard)
I’m wondering, not they’ve opened up the API, what cool stuff will start to happen to statuses though. Twitter’s had an open API for two years now and look at stuff like Tweetdeck, Summize (which Twitter acquired) and Twitterberry.
I completely agree with you, unless I can call my friends by first name on the street, I will never befriend them on facebook. Twitter, on the other hand, I will follow anyone who has good content, just like a blog (hence microblog).
That being said, I wonder how long it will take a crowd of facebookers to turn facebook status updates into microblogs. It is facebook and the masses are there to give the incentive to me as long as I can separate the account from my personal facebook status updates.
For example: My brothers and I created a facebook app Status King. It is based completely around clever Status Updates and we are the first facebook app to turn facebook status updates into t-shirts. If Facebook gives us the ability to create a Status Update microblog for our app, I would use it in a heartbeat—just don’t make it so my friends have to see it without following.
If status updates become the microblogs and customer service and communication for apps, groups, fan pages, and even any website hooked to facebook connect, then I can see why people think this might just be Twitter’s death. Too bad “status update” does not have the wordplay of “twitter”—Twitter still has the most perfectly brandable name I have ever seen.
Drew – agree that a wider API makes it possible for people to develop new services. We might see Facebook evolve a lot from this, and I think it needs to in order to remain the most popular.
I’m coming at it from a ’spamming your friends’ angle – the stream of updates if my friends began updating their status every 20 minutes would make the current implementation of the ‘Newsfeed’ unworkable; you’d either have far too much info on there, or would miss valuable info because Facebook was applying a filter to it.
We’ve seen the site adapt to cope with the spam updates coming from the flood of Applications, so let’s look forwards to how this makes the site adapt further
Good post, Phil. I fail see how anyone could see this as a threat to twitter. Status updates are inherently limited by their format while on the other hand Twitter represents a completely new way of communicating, one in which people choose who to listen to rather than who to talk to.