Twitter was created to allow folks to collaborate more closely than usual. Like most new IM technology, it was supposed to break down barriers. So far, it’s done a reasonably good job.
In October 2009, Twitter attracted 58m web visitors, according to comScore. Recently its growth appears to have slowed down in the United States, but the service is still expanding in countries such as Japan and Germany.
According to the Economist, this has led to speculation that it could eventually make a dent in Facebook’s market, even though size-wise it is not in the same league. The analysts who see a looming clash claim that both companies are in the business of helping people share information in real time.
But, both these services differ in a couple of ways. The first is the nature of the relationships that from the basis of these networks. On Facebook, which is permission based, there are strong privacy levels where one can prohibit one’s profile from being displayed in a search. Also, users can communicate directly only if one of them has agreed to be a friend of the other.
On Twitter, however, there aren’t as many controls and people can sign up to follow any public tweets they like. Twitter’s a broadcasting service which allows its users to transmit short bursts of information to their followers. their followers could range from groups of complete strangers to very close friends. Facebook has conversations that are more private depending on how open one wants to be in there. The Facebook messenger tool allows one-on-one conversations which appeals to some folks who would like private conversations.
In research conducted by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, a professor at Harvard Business School, and one of his MBA students, Bill Heil where they surveyed just over 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009, they found that more than half of them tweeted less than once every 74 days. They also discovered that the most prolific 10% of twitter users accounted for 90% of all tweets. On other online social networks the most active users typically produce just 30% of all content.
Another big difference between Twitter and Facebook is in the kind of content that both networks have. Facebook allows people to exchange videos, photos and notes, whereas Twitter is part-blog, part e-mail.
Last year, after its takeover talks with Twitter stalled, Facebook introduced several Twitter-like changes to make it more attractive for real-time postings. It also gave more visibility to its pages for athletes, celebrities and musicians and lifted the limits on the maximum number of fans that they could have on the site.
The big challenge facing the owners of Twitter is to find smart ways of transforming the raw tweet data into profits. The newest venture of pay-per-tweet may be a step in the right direction though it’s my opinion that they should just charge businesses for opening Twitter accounts. That would get them some quick revenue upfront.
Disclosure : this post is heavily influenced by a similar one by the Economist. See their article here.
