why twitter shouldn't sweat facebook's new homepage

Well kids, prognosticating is the pastime of only the most foolish historian, but here I go anyway. Facebook announced a redesign of their mini-feed user homepage yesterday, a move that TechCrunch summed up as, "If Facebook cannot buy Twitter, it will try to beat it instead." The newsfeed is now updated in real-time, giving you a running stream of what your Facebook friends are up to, and a more Twitter-like experience.

If, as TechCrunch asserts, Facebook is looking to beat Twitter at it's own game, I don't think I would bet on them to do so.

(image credit: Facebook)

I once heard described Twitter as being in an IRC chatroom with the whole world, and that's by design. You can start following people (and thus, having their tweets show up in your homepage feed) without them having to do anything. I'm following Shaquille O'Neal, Al Gore, Peter Ha from CrunchGear, and Rick Liebling from Taylor PR, among a couple of hundred others. Of the four aforementioned, the only one that's also following me is Rick. Twitter is set up with the idea that you can broadcast your updates to total strangers who are interested in following you, and you're under no obligation to hear about their lives.

In contrast to this, Facebook is a much more intimate place than Twitter. Becoming someone's friend on Facebook is not the unilateral decision that it is on Twitter - both parties have to agree to become friends. This useful for keeping your boss and your mother from seeing the Saturday night red cup pictures that your friends are uploading directly from the bar. Facebook has provisions for limited profile access, but this isn't well implemented yet, and I'm curious to see how it gets worked into the new system.

Basically, Twitter has created a place where I or anyone else can stay current with Shaquille O'Neal's thoughts, but where Shaq is under no obligation to let me see pictures of his kids. I took a highly unscientific poll around my office and found that almost no one was Facebook friends with celebrities or writers that they didn't know in real life.* Twitter is an open, single opt-in system versus Facebook's closed, double opt-in system, and that fundamentally informs the nature of the conversations you find there.

Facebook's new feed is a clever feature, but the environment and conversation on Facebook are decidedly different from those on Twitter. There will be room for both.

*Notable exception: strangers from around the world with the same name as you. Facebook search confronted me with an alarming number of Fernando Rizos.

Comments

[jesse]

Jesse likes this

[Andie]

Another major difference is the fact that Twitter is self-contained, and the feed is pretty much an end in itself. While I love the f-book, I'm never tempted down an abyssmal vortex of party photos, wall posts, and bizarre applications when I sign into Twitter, which keeps it from being such a total timesuck. It's more tempting to check, well, constantly throughout the day, but it almost never threatens to steal 45 minutes in a single sitting.

[James Gross]

That is the whole side of the follow/broadcast strategy that is now being implemented. They are clearly trying to get people comfortable with a follow and broadcast model(ie Twitter). Similar to how they got people comfortable to the whole concept of a river of news and broadcasting your social actions on the site.

[Fernando Rizo]

James, you're totally right - but I think it might be tougher to get Facebook users into that mindset than FB realizes. I'm marking my calendar to revisit this in a year and see if I was right or not. :)