Twitter vs. Facebook: fad vs. need?
Tim Finin, 9:52am 3 April 2009Earlier this week the Baltimore Sun’s Andrew Ratner had a story on Twitter, When did Twitter take over the universe?. The story had this interesting quote from UMBC’s Zeynep Tufekci:
Some people who study technology aren’t sure Twitter will endure.
“Frankly, I think a lot of twittering is somewhat faddish, whereas I never thought Facebook was. … People I interviewed and surveyed would talk of serious feeling of deprivation without Facebook and I’ve hardly heard anyone say that about twitter,” Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor who teaches the sociology of technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wrote in an e-mail. “Will people Twitter five years from now? Perhaps, but I would not be surprised if they did not, or at least as much.”
Ebiquity Blog
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
It seems to me that both Facebook and Twitter are fads. Friendster was the first big social networking site, then it was MySpace, and now it’s Facebook. MySpace is considered the “ghetto” social networking site now, and nobody even talks about Friendster anymore. After Facebook’s terms of service fiasco they could have easily lost their momentum to another competing site.
Eventually Facebook probably will lose its popularity if for no other reason than because it’s not the new, hot, hip thing. That’s exactly what happened when everyone left MySpace for Facebook. These kinds of sites are all about instant gratification, socializing, showing everyone else what you’re doing and seeing what others are doing, etc. If part of being hip is to move to another site (I’m not kidding) and that idea starts to catch on, people do it in droves. Then the rest of us who are left behind on a dead social networking site eventually move over too because nobody else is on MySpace (or Facebook?) anymore
April 4th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
According to CW, we should expect Twitter, having received so much media attention, to now face a backlash. Prophecy coming true?
http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_6_stages_of_twitter_media_coverage_hell
April 14th, 2009 at 7:13 am
Twitter and Facebook are different in one important and fundamental respect. The power of Twitter comes from exposing your tweets to the entire world. That is the norm on Twitter, not the exception as in Facebook. That openness allows you to build new weak ties with others around the world that may be difficult to impossible to foster offline. If exercised appropriately, Twitter provides a significant value proposition that Facebook simply cannot provide. As you express your identity on Twitter through a history of tweets, relevant relationship discovery begins to happen for free as others who are searching find and follow you. I experience it routinely firsthand and it is fantastic. This is no fad for me. Twitter yields real value for me each day.
September 21st, 2009 at 6:30 pm
However nobody gives a crap what normal people Twitter. Celebrities are the only people that can make use of Twitter. 70% of Tweets are useless babble it was shown in a recent research study. Nobody cares when you wake up and pour a bowl of cereal.