Mark Z, the founder of Facebook recently announced the launch of Facebook Stream, a service that would allow Facebook users to obtain real time updates of their friends’ activities in Facebook. Having failed to buy out Twitter, this latest strategy is obviously designed to take them head on….if you can’t buy ’em…..beat ’em at their own game.
But there are fundamental differences in the two services that lead me to believe this is another one of Facebook’s mis-steps. Just taking myself as an example, I keep a bare bones profile on Twitter. The aim of that service in my mind is to connect with groups of people who might be interesting and who might in turn find me interesting. I follow Barack Obama, some consumer brands, etc….to get sound bite updates of whats going on. Obviously there are some people I do know who follow me and whom I follow, but their updates are of less interest to me!
My Facebook profile though is different. My connections on Facebook all have a more substantial social link with me than those on Twitter. Though there might be nothing embarrassing on my profile, I do not easily accept friend requests from people I do not know unless there is some reason for the request (eg. we play the same game on Facebook). I cannot imagine transferring all my Twitter contacts to Facebook and while I have used security settings on Facebook to group friends and keep them out of some parts of my profile, I think its way too much of a hassle to do it just for the same privileges I already get with Twitter. Besides, my Twitter posts are automatically updated to my Facebook profile by FriendFeed.
I can understand why Facebook wants the Twitter customer though. While I log into Facebook maybe three times a day, my Twitter connection is on all day, and I can post and receive on my mobile. Imagine the marketing information Facebook can collect from me if I maintain an almost full time connection….to say nothing of the marketing crap they can push out to me in real time. I think the convenience of a single sign in vs the inconvenience of a mass of marketing messages pushed out to me is a poor trade off and I will maintain separate accounts.
Tong Hsien-Hui
Some Meowsings...... 