Dsanka’s Pensieve

You may all have noticed the recent changes facebook has made to their home page. This new redesign comes in less than an year after their previous redesign (feed centric design). Those of you who use twitter may have noticed that facebook is trying to replicate twitter. Here’s why: facebook feels threatened by twitter.

I am going to make a bold prediction here. I think twitter is going to be way more profitable than facebook and i think facebook sees this threat. I am not just pulling this out of my ass. Read on if you want to know why.

I know this is a long article. I would really like a conversation starting around this topic though. So please try and read through this.

Facebook has a huge userbase. Way bigger than twitter’s. Unfortunately facebook is far from being profitable. Facebook’s revenue for the last year was somewhere in the region of $350 million. Facebook has 175 million users. This equates to about $2 per user per year. This is an absurd figure. Oh and by the way Facebook’s operational costs exceed their revenue so even more bad news. It’s going to be a while before things turn around for facebook. They have a tough path ahead of them.

The only knock i have against twitter is that mainstream still doesn’t understand the purpose of twitter. I have tried explaining this to a ton of my friends but i don’t think they get it. I almost feel like you have to use this service to truly understand it. Twitter is not just about letting the world know when you eat or sleep. Its a lot more than that and the sooner this misconception clears out the better it will be for twitter.

1. Viral abilities: Facebook’s viral abilities are fast disappearing. The privacy settings are a huge barrier in this respect. The amount of customization they allow on the news feed further hampers this. In addition to that i think their new feed hurts their viral abilities even more. Think about this: the new feed updates every 5 minutes or so. Which means if i log in every couple of hours there are going to be atleast 10-15 stories that i will definitely miss. I know there exists a highlights feature on the home page but i doubt that’s gonna cut it. Take a look at twitter now: by typing up 140 characters i can reach thousands of people instantly with their real time feed. Re-tweeting is a huge viral feature. In addition to that your message could me discovered on search.twitter.com. Twitter also sends out their tweets to desktop clients, mobile applications, text messages etc. This means i don’t need you to be on your twitter page all the time to get my message across (unlike facebook where you have to visit the homepage).
2. Facebook Pages vs Twitter celebrity profiles: Facebook pages have horribly low visibility. In addition to that facebook doesn’t provide any worthwhile communication tools for brands to be able to reach their fans (the update feature just does not cut it). On the other hand twitter celebrity pages have hundreds of thousands of followers. Since each celebrity carries a cell phone around it is far easier for them to tweet than it is to log in to facebook and send out an update. This makes twitter a more suitable platform for brands and marketers.
3. Advertising: So this is how both services plan to make their money (more or less). Facebook is going to have a rough time advertising mainly because of privacy concerns. The fact that they use the information you give them to advertise to you makes people feel their trust and privacy have been violated. Add to that the fact that no one is looking for advertising on a social network and now facebook has one huge mess of a problem. Twitter on the other hand has a far easier road to take to make it to advertising glory. One thing to consider here is that people choose to follow a certain brand or celebrity which means they are interested in knowing more about them which is perfect for marketing (think of it as google ad words but real time, now imagine the power).Here’s a true example: I tweeted out to a friend of mine (@reply to be exact) that i loved potbelly’s cookies more than insomnia. It so happened that VP of brand for potbelly’s happened to see my tweet (probably on search.twitter.com) and asked me for my opinion on an idea they had. What if my local potbelly’s could tweet out every time a fresh batch of cookies came out of the oven. This is an absolutely brilliant idea. This is the kind of information i want as a potbelly’s customer and this is the kind of real time marketing potbelly’s would like. Now imagine this: this kind of marketing can be used by every single business big or small. Not everyone needs to be on facebook but everyone will eventually need to be on twitter. Once again the ability to reach thousands within seconds is of huge importance here (through phones, mobile apps, web interfaces etc)
4. The developer divide: Facebook developers are not super thrilled to be developing for facebook. There have been some apps that have been questionably removed from facebook. In addition to that the new approval program and site design make it so that facebook apps have low visibility to the users. People have forgotten about facebook apps (atleast a huge chunk of users have). On the other hand twitter developers are a happy bunch. One example is search.twitter.com (used to be called summize) which was acquired by twitter (huge acquisition btw. this can open some gates for twitter- more info later)
5. Search: Facebook search sucks. Lets be honest – all it comes up with is a sparse profile on the user nothing more. This in all honesty is worth crap. The reason they can’t be more creative with it is because of (you guessed it right) PRIVACY settings. On the other hand search.twitter.com is a real time feed of people’s thoughts. This i have to believe is worth its weight in gold for marketers. Not just that twitter could implement google adwords like schemes here more ad revenue (once again because a user is looking for something they are more likely to want to be advertised to)
6. How are these platforms viewed: Facebook is just another communication. It might even have replaced email, text messaging and IM for a fair number of users. unfortunately these wont make you much money. In addition to that facebook is a photo,video repository for a ton of people. Twitter on the other hand is this amazing information sharing platform. I can get realtime opinions on topics through their search. In addition to that tweets i send out and receive are a valuable source of information. Twitter also provides and individual to have the ability to reach thousands in a matter of seconds. Through their followers and Re-tweeting abilities of twitter users.
7. Simplicity: Twitter’s simplicity will ultimately make it a way more useful tool for users than facebook. facebook is too convoluted right now. There is too much going on.
8. Mobile vs. Web: Mobile is the future isn’t it?. Twitter is way better positioned to take on the mobile market than facebook is. Reason: it’s lightweight nature of use makes it usable on any cellphone on the planet.

So now that i have gone on a full blown rant/analysis what do you guys think?