The Big Bang Theory [CBS]

Isn’t it funny how things you take for granted in the web development/tech industry break into the mainstream, and you suddenly take a look back at them with a slightly different perspective? When you think about it, this happens across the board, from a favorite indie band “selling out” and going all Top 40 on you, to a respected boutique advertising or design firm garnering awards, gaining recognition and supplanting a more staid, traditional agency.

The shift in how you think about these services just seems to be a little more noticeable when applied to web technologies and services that were originally very niche-market or highly early-adopter centric like Twitter or even the popularity of the Web 2.0-style design movement.

Resurrecting an old debate

I was watching a new sitcom a couple of nights ago and the main character made a reference to “twittering“, and the episode was discussing one of the characters’ newfound addiction to MMORPGs (namely Funcom’s Age of Conan.) I found the whole thing quite amusing, and — to my own amazement — I even enjoyed the show, which doesn’t happen too often these days considering what’s on the tube.

Much as they do in the world of message forums — for kicks, primarily — one of my handful of blog readers dropped me a line earlier today asking me to revive an old discussion and relate my current thoughts on the Twitter vs. Facebook issue (in terms of microblogging/lifestreaming, not general platform usage.) The email was with respect to my previous post on this topic from nearly eight months ago, and brought to mind the sitcom I’d watched earlier in the week. Unsurprisingly, my stance has changed somewhat based on my usage of both services for the last few months. From a high-level perspective, my Facebook usage has dwindled while my Twitter usage has either increased or stayed around the same, depending on when you sample it.

Focusing on the content

Facebook is effectively an oddity, a singular instance of a system that doesn’t work particular well anywhere else. Despite Josh Porter’s assertion in Designing for the Social Web that the best social media sites are the ones where most of the interaction is centralized on specific activities or types of content (think Netflix with DVDs, Delicious with bookmarks, and even Protagonize with short stories), Facebook is a pure-play social network; a site whose only purpose is to let people connect, socialize, and share miscellaneous media and content. There is no content object sitting at the root of this interaction, barring the user’s profile itself; most other systems using this kind of model tend to either stagnate and stay small, or to fall apart and decline in usage (*cough* Friendster *cough*) when the user has nothing to do other than update their profile and look at those of others. Users get bored, run out of things to do, and move on unless you give them a specific, enjoyable activity to pursue.

This all comes back to a core design philosophy: do one thing simply, and do it well. It’s an old adage, but it holds true in this case.

Doing one thing well

Facebook thrives mainly because they have a clean, streamlined visual design (though the latest update to their layout may cause many to disagree with me), appealing to a very broad market. It doesn’t have the chaotic mess of MySpace, or the usability issues inherent in other social networks. Facebook now owns a massive share of the market; their community is endless and very nearly monopolistic in size, even with respect to MySpace’s tens of millions of users. The reason I mention MySpace here is that even they appear to be embracing more specific content types, steering continually into the direction of the music and entertainment genre, building label affiliations and content distribution deals under Fox Interactive Media’s guiding hand.

Twitter, on the other hand, focuses is on short, staccato commentary. It may or not be conversational in tone; that really depends on the user whose posts you’re following. The central object in Twitter’s case is the message in its atomic form, and not the poster’s profile. Enforcing a 140-character limit to tweet length really emphasizes the brevity, wittiness, or candour you have to strive for in such a restrictive medium. The existence of the Twitties and Twitter API-based social experiments like Twistori alone are enough to validate my opinion. With this in mind, it’s easy enough to stay on-topic, since every post you make to Twitter is individually viewable and linkable, a history of your activity archived for posterity, much moreso than Facebook status updates. Every tweet is recorded, and can be easily isolated and referred to, which definitely adds some pressure to making them all individually worthwhile, which in turn increases the quality of the content across the board (or at least, one would hope so.)

The difference here is the lack of focus on Facebook — while they’ve incorporated many of the same elements you find in Twitter or other microblogging platforms like Jaiku (which, like Facebook’s status updates, allows for threaded commentary), it’s blended in with wall posts, photos from your friends, and random application-inserted notices. Even with their new bolded style, where status updates show up a little more prominently, they are largely lost in the clutter. Without the necessary focus, the value and quality of these updates deteriorates, which is why I find myself disenchanted with Facebook, rarely updating my status, or even going to the site at all recently.

Different strokes for different folks

While in my original post I primarily discussed the actual usability of the Twitter site itself versus the client applications its API spawned, I think the most interesting thing about Twitter is how the size of the following you have heavily influences the way you use it. Most members of the Twitterati with massive followings such as Leo Laporte or Jason Calacanis use it as a broadcast-only, primarily rhetorical medium for updating their fans as to their whereabouts, recent creations or thoughts. On the other hand, the average user with a drastically smaller follower base may find that they use it much more conversationally, posting commentary and insights that actually evoke discussion amongst their circle of followers. Of course, the Twitter interface doesn’t really help with this as it doesn’t support threaded conversations; you can tell that its users are making do (or it could just be a case of vendor lock-in), since other platforms that do offer the feature aren’t growing at nearly the same rate.

Both Facebook and Twitter are very ego-centric popularity contests in different ways. Twitter moreso depending on how many followers you have, assuming most of them aren’t spammers. Facebook is high school in digital form, and the younger you are, the more uncanny the resemblance. Posting photos of your drunken escapades last weekend is commonplace. On Twitter, listening to the sound of your own voice is definitely a common refrain. In fact, I’d argue that the medium encourages it; no one is going to follow you without a good stream of soundbyte-esque tweets, unless they know you in person.

Disparate communities

I use Twitter and Facebook quite differently. The people I follow on Twitter are mainly folks in my industry, the vast majority of whom I don’t know personally. Those who follow me are typically in the same boat (barring the spammers and so-called ”social media marketers” who have so insidiously worked their way into the system.)

If I were to dissect my Twitter usage into general overarching themes, it would probably look something like this:

• As a marketing and promotional vehicle for my personal brand, including the content I create and the sites I develop and operate
• Keeping in touch with long-distance colleagues or people I’ve met at conferences or other events
• General discussion with people in my industry
• As a general-purpose linklog
• Lifestreaming (which means, basically, just random thoughts and miscellany that I spurt out at odd intervals)
• As an SMS-replacement for friends and acquaintances I know at other local companies, allowing me to banter pointlessly and organize or discover local events
• Socializing with people I don’t know very well (but — in some cases — may want to know better)

On Facebook, my community is, for the most part, my real life friends and acquaintances. I also have a group of people who have added me as a friend based on the work that I do at Protagonize, but I do keep them on a separate list so as not to get everyone mixed up. Either way, the overlap with my Twitter community is minimal; 10-15% at best, I should think. My Facebook connections have no real interest in knowing or hearing about my job or my day-to-day work-related rants and musings, so the stuff I post there tends to be somewhat more personal.

I’ve found that there’s a point at both ends of the Twitter usage cycle, either as a follower or as a poster, where you hit a critical mass and feel like you’re drinking from the firehose, which is not something most people enjoy doing (and it’s the reason I don’t use services like FriendFeed regularly.) That number tends to be distinctly higher on Twitter, because you don’t necessarily care as much about the content, so you may not read as much of what’s coming through, which in turn means that volume/quantity of posts may not bother you quite as much. On Facebook, you likely read more of what’s coming through, and are willing to put up with less garbage. Hence my mass uninstallation of Facebook applications, just due to general spamminess. In that sense, I think both sites play host to separate flavours of the Dunbar Number, where Twitter resembles a mass media following with ~1000s of people (or at least several hundred) as a common prime network size, and Facebook would be a classic social network in where most users are most comfortable at or around ~150 friends.

What does the future hold?

It’ll be curious to see if with mainstream adoption, new Twitter members from other walks of life start driving usage in a different direction. Will these disparate communities start to overlap more as less technology-oriented folks start using both systems? You can already see the tip of the iceberg in the new US Election ‘08 coverage on Twitter and the deluge of discussion about Sarah Palin in the last few weeks (and Obama for the last few months). There’s a striking similarity to how Digg has expanded in the last two years from being a site with major Slashdot overtones and a hugely techie community, to a site trying to appeal to a broader segment of the market with much more political coverage, and achieve similar penetration to Facebook. Strategic partnerships between Facebook and Digg just reinforce this notion.

I’ll have to check back in a year or two and see where things stand, but for the time being there’s still a big gap between the communities, from my perspective. But it’s tightening up. Will there be a revolt amongst old-school Twitter users? Will they leave in droves or open up the floodgates and let their communities merge? Only time will tell, but it should be fun to watch.

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Posted in Community Building, General, Opinion, Social Media, web 2.0 |