Back in December, in “A look back at 2007“, I wrote that I believed early adopters’ interest in Facebook had peaked and had even started to decline. Recently, the blogosphere echoed that sentiment with news of “Facebook fatigue”.
- In January, The Register started by saying “Whisper it, but numbers from web analytics outfit comScore have confirmed what the chatter in bars and cafes has been saying for months – people are, just, well, bored of social networks.” About Facebook, they added that “behaviour seems much the same; join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted.”
- A few weeks later, Techcrunch also looking at ComScore data said “The number of people who visit Facebook has been leveling off over the past few months in the U.S., and even dipped by about 800,000 individuals in January. (…) Maybe all that friend spam has something to do with the decline. Will the Facebook fatigue get worse, or is this just a temporary dip?”
- Adding his grain of salt, Rory Cellan-Jones from the BBC added: “The general feeling is that the kids, with their minute attention spans, have already tired of the social networking site and moved on to something more hip and happening. I think the opposite is true – that Facebook’s new wave of older users have decided it is just not worth the bother and are now leaving it to the kids.”
I agree. My personal experience with Facebook is that its relative utility for me has decreased drastically in the last few months. There used to be a lot of “friend” activities in my newsfeed and in my status updates. Even though I have more than 550 “friends”, I suspect that only 20% at most are using it regularly. As I wrote two months ago, Facebook is just a game. Industry pundits are looking for utility and, for a while, it certainly felt like Facebook was IT. But not anymore. Has something replaced it? Yes. Today, I’d like to say it’s Twitter. It’s all anecdotal, mind you, based on my brain filtering a massive quantity of articles and blog posts I read every day. You’ll have to trust me on this. 🙂 Should you still care about Facebook? A resounding YES! As Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures Partners says “The digerati, with their Outlook address books and social network friends lists in the 1000s, bloated by people they met at conferences several years ago, are edge use cases. Their experience is atypical. Normal users of social networks use Facebook apps in the same way that middle America forwards emails to one another.” Those millions of users are not going away and Facebook is still a formidable platform to broadcast your brand and content.
But back to Twitter, what is it? Twitter is a micro-blogging application that allows you to send text messages of up to 140 characters. It really exploded on the Web scene last year at the SXSW Interactive Festival. People started using it in drove but I wasn’t sure what to do with it (and I’m sure I was not alone), until Facebook taught us how to “Twitter” through its “Status Update” feature. Along with the newsfeed, it is one of Facebook’s killer apps but I think most people found it too limited in functionality. It was really just about broadcasting information.
Twitter is much more. It can be a:
- Broadcast tool. Send information to your network of “followers”, your latest blog post, a breaking news, a summary of a conference you’re attending, the boring stuff of your daily life, etc. Best of all, you can share clickable URLs.
- Conversation tool. Using the @ symbol followed by the Twitter alias, you can ask questions, join an existing conversation and contribute to the community.
- Early warning system. Breaking news seem to pop-up on Twitter much more quickly than in other media. I’ve learned about different breaking news more quickly in the last few weeks using it. Some people have already created specific channels for breaking news, which you can start following. See BreakingNewsOn or the Techmeme firehose.
- Proxy conferences. Recently, I was able to follow updates from the TED, a very coveted invite-only conference. You could obviously follow it in real time, but through structured data standards called hashtags, you can also see what people have been reporting about TED here.
- Subscribe to people. Where else can you follow updates and insights from industry luminaries like Pierre Omidyar (eBay’s founder) or Paul Kedrosky (famed Canadian VC)? There are hundreds of interesting people to follow in Twitter.
Howard Rheingold of SmartMobs fame offers even more reasons to like Twitter.
Twitter obviously has flaws:
- It hasn’t announced a business model yet and people are afraid its introduction will break the utility.
- It suffers from many well-documented technical interruptions.
- You can’t segment your “tribes”, allowing you to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, as you start following more people.
- Most of my (and possibly your) contacts are not on Twitter yet, which reduces its intrinsic value.
- It’s a huge time-waster, looking at the conversation feed and making sense of it all.
But even with these flaws, I expect Twitter to really catch fire in the next few months, with more people joining, trying it out, finding utility and transforming it into a vibrant worlwide conversation-based community. Even my Praized Media partner, Sylvain, is organizing the first TwittYul, an informal event for Montreal Twitter users and fans You could read about it first … on Twitter. BTW, if you join and want to follow my “tweets”, I can be found here: http://twitter.com/Praized
Seb Provencher's Blog 
Sebastien,
My explore with Facebook and Twitter is very similar to your’s. What I wonder is whether Twitter will go through the same cycle as Facebook as people get over the novelty, and look for their next digital fix.
Sebastien,
My explore with Facebook and Twitter is very similar to your’s. What I wonder is whether Twitter will go through the same cycle as Facebook as people get over the novelty, and look for their next digital fix.
I think point #5 is the most important – I can’t even look at it because there is just so much noise there.
Like AhmedP said, point #5 is the big thing making me sometimes upset about Twitter. Its a good tool, but it’ll be a great one if they can fix that, by more tweaking of the info you get.
Like AhmedP said, point #5 is the big thing making me sometimes upset about Twitter. Its a good tool, but it’ll be a great one if they can fix that, by more tweaking of the info you get.
The big advantage that Twitter has over Facebook is that you can control the signal to noise ratio. I only follow about 10 people at a time and will quickly unsubscribe from those who insist on telling what they had for lunch, what their cat is doing or what they just read on Digg.
By contrast, Facebook insists on bombarding me with requests to throw zombies at pirates or updates on who is playing Scrabulous.
I still use FB to keep in touch with my friends outside the industry, but Twitter feeds me the latest buzz.
Exact same feelings, Sebastien. Facebook is too much effort, and I am incredibly uninterested in the widgets that my friends want me to add.
I find myself getting addicted to Twitter in short bursts. But I find, like you mention in flaw #3, that I want to listen or speak to different groups — from talking about social media theory, to debates on who is going to be voted off american idol. I’ve considered having two identities on there, but that just overly complicates life.
Exact same feelings, Sebastien. Facebook is too much effort, and I am incredibly uninterested in the widgets that my friends want me to add.
I find myself getting addicted to Twitter in short bursts. But I find, like you mention in flaw #3, that I want to listen or speak to different groups — from talking about social media theory, to debates on who is going to be voted off american idol. I’ve considered having two identities on there, but that just overly complicates life.
I have recently become very interested in “social media” since, as a marketing professor, I believe this truly is the future of marketing. And please let me be clear that by that I mean “marketing” and not simply “advertising.” The ability to listen to conversations among consumers and engage consumers in conversations should/could radically transform the ways companies are able to cater to customers. This assumes, of course, that as marketers we don’t go for the “get rich quick” approach. I already dread the day that I see some 30 minute infomercial on “Using Social Media For Fun and Profit!!” I’m sure someone like Don Lepre is right now sitting in their tiny one bedroom apartment (if you don’t get that reference you have no idea what you have missed! :-)) figuring out a way to take advantage of other people via social media.
However, my concern is exactly that voiced above about Facebook. For example, I personally have never seen the utility of either Facebook or MySpace and wonder if Twitter may not have the same sort of lifecycle. The bottom line is how is any of this all that significantly different from e-mail or web boards? I do realize that Twitter is easier to use across more hardware platforms (e.g., computer, cell phone, PDA, etc) but isn’t it still, at its most fundamental level, communicating with another person or persons? I’ve been doing that since the early 1990s on first various newsgroups, then e-mail lists and now web boards. The question is why would the group of us who subscribe to a e-mail list devoted to our beloved University of Kentucky Wildcat basketball team would want/need to move that to something like Twitter?
Sebastien, I think you are 100 % right. I feel like Facebook is even worst than what you mean. I love what Kathryn saied. “Facebook …. and I am incredibly uninterested in the widgets that my friends want me to add” That is what happens to me.
Sebastien, I think you are 100 % right. I feel like Facebook is even worst than what you mean. I love what Kathryn saied. “Facebook …. and I am incredibly uninterested in the widgets that my friends want me to add” That is what happens to me.
I think that a new social messaging platform solves a lot of the issues that you’ve found with Twitter. Pownce lets you message to individuals or groups and has an integrated business model.
Try it out. I like it a lot. http://www.pownce.com
I think that a new social messaging platform solves a lot of the issues that you’ve found with Twitter. Pownce lets you message to individuals or groups and has an integrated business model.
Try it out. I like it a lot. http://www.pownce.com
Agreed – if only from my own usage patterns. Twitter is so easy and convenient to use a monkey could do it. The time commitment is practically nil. Facebook feels more and more like a chore, and at worst it’s spammy.
It does seem that Twitter is where Facebook was a couple of years ago in terms of breaking from the cognoscenti to the masses. Like any social tool, the value is directly proportional to the value of the people you’re connected with – a network of bozos is worth very little. Right now there are a disproportionate number of highly interesting people on Twitter, it’ll be interesting to see if an influx of new users increases or dilutes the value.
Can’t resist a brief plug: I’m running a Twitter Business Plan Contest through midnight tonight, Saturday 3/8 at http://eggheadmarketing.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/twitter-business-plan-contest/ . Tweet me a business plan in <140 characters!
It does seem that Twitter is where Facebook was a couple of years ago in terms of breaking from the cognoscenti to the masses. Like any social tool, the value is directly proportional to the value of the people you’re connected with – a network of bozos is worth very little. Right now there are a disproportionate number of highly interesting people on Twitter, it’ll be interesting to see if an influx of new users increases or dilutes the value.
Can’t resist a brief plug: I’m running a Twitter Business Plan Contest through midnight tonight, Saturday 3/8 at http://eggheadmarketing.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/twitter-business-plan-contest/ . Tweet me a business plan in <140 characters!
Toujours très fier quand je vois un lien homepage Digg vers un site /Québec ! Excellent! Profitez bien du SXSW !
Toujours très fier quand je vois un lien homepage Digg vers un site /Québec ! Excellent! Profitez bien du SXSW !
Are you serious?
I crunch hundreds of blog entries and articles every day, and I could not have come up with your conclusions.
Facebook is a useful utility that can be used as a socialising “game.” I don’t think be able to post albums of my friends new baby or finding old friends is a game (the core of facebooks usage – friends and pictures.) Then you have to also think about the elimination of evites with facebooks much better system and interest groups that really connnect groups of people and they are formed and grown rapidly on facebook.
Twitter is useless crap, for people who have too much time on their hands. I would never waste my time letting my friends – accross the world – know I’m feeling sad or that I’m sitting at Starbucks on richmond street. Anything relevant that twitter informs, there’s a much better way to communicate or find out that same information. It’s a frivolous extension of the web 2.0 fad. It’s terrible at most things that it’s supposed to “do” (really doesn’t do anything) and there’s a reason why most of your friends don’t use it. Most people are too busy to synergize their life activities with twitter – “i just met bob”…”i’m having a ham sandwich”…”i was just dropped on my head,and now I love spending time twittering info that no one really cares about”
Perhaps you’re just not of the online community generation and you don’t really understand any of this? I find that a lot of people in that situation get confused by facebooks new expansion into USER CREATED applications, and they forget what facebooks core usage and purpose is.
Are you serious?
I crunch hundreds of blog entries and articles every day, and I could not have come up with your conclusions.
Facebook is a useful utility that can be used as a socialising “game.” I don’t think be able to post albums of my friends new baby or finding old friends is a game (the core of facebooks usage – friends and pictures.) Then you have to also think about the elimination of evites with facebooks much better system and interest groups that really connnect groups of people and they are formed and grown rapidly on facebook.
Twitter is useless crap, for people who have too much time on their hands. I would never waste my time letting my friends – accross the world – know I’m feeling sad or that I’m sitting at Starbucks on richmond street. Anything relevant that twitter informs, there’s a much better way to communicate or find out that same information. It’s a frivolous extension of the web 2.0 fad. It’s terrible at most things that it’s supposed to “do” (really doesn’t do anything) and there’s a reason why most of your friends don’t use it. Most people are too busy to synergize their life activities with twitter – “i just met bob”…”i’m having a ham sandwich”…”i was just dropped on my head,and now I love spending time twittering info that no one really cares about”
Perhaps you’re just not of the online community generation and you don’t really understand any of this? I find that a lot of people in that situation get confused by facebooks new expansion into USER CREATED applications, and they forget what facebooks core usage and purpose is.
i couldnt agree more. facebook has become pretty boring and routine at this point and it really seems to have lost a lot of steam. i think people really need to expect that this sort of thing will continue to happen over and over again. the internet is a constantly changing place and nothing will ever stay the same.
from your mouth to god’s ears 🙂
it seems to me that twitter and facebook serve similar purposes, albiet facebook is a slightly more complex tool. I would wager that neither of them will prove to be very compelling in the long run (4-5 years)
it seems to me that twitter and facebook serve similar purposes, albiet facebook is a slightly more complex tool. I would wager that neither of them will prove to be very compelling in the long run (4-5 years)
@Jar
It seems to me YOU are “Perhaps not of the online community generation and you don’t really understand any of this”!
I have been a YouTube half-star, a frivolous yet glittered-up myspace user, a facebook zombie, a Jyter, an Orkuter, Even squidoo’ed a bit…
Twitter does a perfect job at giving me what I need(ed) from these communities (and filtering out what i dont need): People’s attention (for my attention-whore-ness), A buzz of what’s happening in and about the geekernets, connections to people I admire, a ephemeral sense of being liked (followers), a no brainer way to get anything out to everyone may it be video or images or links (think tinyurl), no advertisers unless I have advertising friends and THAT kind of ads I WANT, total spam control! And I can use it through my im, my phone, my blog, my own custom code…. Heck, maybe I can hook up a bird house with the API so they get their own custom feed(s).
Maybe you need to use it a bit more and follow some more “prominent” or “interesting” people. You’ve just had a bad experience with ham sandwich eaters.
@Jar
It seems to me YOU are “Perhaps not of the online community generation and you don’t really understand any of this”!
I have been a YouTube half-star, a frivolous yet glittered-up myspace user, a facebook zombie, a Jyter, an Orkuter, Even squidoo’ed a bit…
Twitter does a perfect job at giving me what I need(ed) from these communities (and filtering out what i dont need): People’s attention (for my attention-whore-ness), A buzz of what’s happening in and about the geekernets, connections to people I admire, a ephemeral sense of being liked (followers), a no brainer way to get anything out to everyone may it be video or images or links (think tinyurl), no advertisers unless I have advertising friends and THAT kind of ads I WANT, total spam control! And I can use it through my im, my phone, my blog, my own custom code…. Heck, maybe I can hook up a bird house with the API so they get their own custom feed(s).
Maybe you need to use it a bit more and follow some more “prominent” or “interesting” people. You’ve just had a bad experience with ham sandwich eaters.
Well, I’m not sure what’s up with me todaya, but I felt like responding to some of your thoughts:
@andymurd
true, you can control signal to noise ratio much easier, which is one of its strengths.
@Tom Baker
The difference is, twitter has a completely different feel and dynamic behind it. Twitter is light, simple, and alive.
@Webomatica
My thoughts exactly. I never even joined Facebook or MySpace because I could feel they’d be chores just by watching people accept friend requests… But I joined Twitter in about 5 minutes.
@rsomers
I wouldn’t count on it. There are already plenty of boring people on twitter, and I’ve already unsubscribed to a few. The magic of it is, the good stuff rises to the top. People tend to discover other people when one of their contacts replies to another person they don’t know. All they have to do is click on the “@username” and they’ve just met a new person. Ergo, Twitter organically builds networks because whoever you meet is through someone you already know.
@Jar
Right, but the problem is people don’t look at it as programming playground, they look at it as a social network, and the concept of a “social network” is still very much in flux.
@BuzzCritic
It’s kind of ironic that your name has “buzz” in it, because I think that’s the reason why twitter will be with us for a while. Twitter IS buzz. Twitter IS easy. Twitter is ALIVE. Because of the perceived simplicity inherent to twitter, the barrier to entry is much lower than facebook.
Well, I’m not sure what’s up with me todaya, but I felt like responding to some of your thoughts:
@andymurd
true, you can control signal to noise ratio much easier, which is one of its strengths.
@Tom Baker
The difference is, twitter has a completely different feel and dynamic behind it. Twitter is light, simple, and alive.
@Webomatica
My thoughts exactly. I never even joined Facebook or MySpace because I could feel they’d be chores just by watching people accept friend requests… But I joined Twitter in about 5 minutes.
@rsomers
I wouldn’t count on it. There are already plenty of boring people on twitter, and I’ve already unsubscribed to a few. The magic of it is, the good stuff rises to the top. People tend to discover other people when one of their contacts replies to another person they don’t know. All they have to do is click on the “@username” and they’ve just met a new person. Ergo, Twitter organically builds networks because whoever you meet is through someone you already know.
@Jar
Right, but the problem is people don’t look at it as programming playground, they look at it as a social network, and the concept of a “social network” is still very much in flux.
@BuzzCritic
It’s kind of ironic that your name has “buzz” in it, because I think that’s the reason why twitter will be with us for a while. Twitter IS buzz. Twitter IS easy. Twitter is ALIVE. Because of the perceived simplicity inherent to twitter, the barrier to entry is much lower than facebook.
I’ve been trying out Twitter for my 2nd time (tried it a year ago or so, and again starting a couple weeks ago), and — once again — I’m about ready to pull the plug.
Do I really NEED superficial and often frequent blips about a conference I’m not attending? Are these especially interesting? Not usually. Actionable? Hardly. How can anyone prefer such disconnected tidbits to, say, a well-thought out article in print or on a blog about the experience?
What? You protest that you’d have to actually WAIT a few days or a week? Are you that impatient or is your life that devoid of activities and interests that such a delay proves distressing?
What have we become as a society when we need EVERYTHING in tiny bite-sized chunks, RIGHT NOW?!
I’ve been trying out Twitter for my 2nd time (tried it a year ago or so, and again starting a couple weeks ago), and — once again — I’m about ready to pull the plug.
Do I really NEED superficial and often frequent blips about a conference I’m not attending? Are these especially interesting? Not usually. Actionable? Hardly. How can anyone prefer such disconnected tidbits to, say, a well-thought out article in print or on a blog about the experience?
What? You protest that you’d have to actually WAIT a few days or a week? Are you that impatient or is your life that devoid of activities and interests that such a delay proves distressing?
What have we become as a society when we need EVERYTHING in tiny bite-sized chunks, RIGHT NOW?!
seems like all of these tools have developed and serve different purposes for different facets of your life
i use twitter as a way to keep up with the who’s who in social media, the really smart people i want to pay attention to – they give me new insights, a laugh or two and a better understanding for who they are as people – i find them interesting, call me a geek.
for facebook its also about communication, but more one to one with my friends and collegues, self expression and exploration of what are others are up to – to be honest, really couldn’t live with out either
seems like all of these tools have developed and serve different purposes for different facets of your life
i use twitter as a way to keep up with the who’s who in social media, the really smart people i want to pay attention to – they give me new insights, a laugh or two and a better understanding for who they are as people – i find them interesting, call me a geek.
for facebook its also about communication, but more one to one with my friends and collegues, self expression and exploration of what are others are up to – to be honest, really couldn’t live with out either
The problem with Facebook is the spam apps. Most grow tired of them really fast. I think the future of social network sites will be genre specific. Into sports? Join a social network with news etc.No hugs, zombies etc.
I never hear anybody talk about Netvibes, I love their new release, Ginger.
Personal RSS pages, now with your own “universe” you can share and no ads and silly apps.
Biggest problem with Twitter is trying to follow conversations. For example if you reply to a old twitter from someone, it will show up as a reply to their latest twitter. It has absolutely no concept of threading or anything that could make it possible to find out what exactly was in reply to what.
Jaiku is a bit better in this regard, but it has had uptime issues.
Niall.
Biggest problem with Twitter is trying to follow conversations. For example if you reply to a old twitter from someone, it will show up as a reply to their latest twitter. It has absolutely no concept of threading or anything that could make it possible to find out what exactly was in reply to what.
Jaiku is a bit better in this regard, but it has had uptime issues.
Niall.
To answer Adam’s question:
What have we become as a society when we need EVERYTHING in tiny bite-sized chunks, RIGHT NOW?!
YES
To answer Adam’s question:
What have we become as a society when we need EVERYTHING in tiny bite-sized chunks, RIGHT NOW?!
YES, you have asked the right question and the answer whatever it is will determine the future of sites like twitter.
To answer Adam’s question:
What have we become as a society when we need EVERYTHING in tiny bite-sized chunks, RIGHT NOW?!
YES, you have asked the right question and the answer whatever it is will determine the future of sites like twitter.
I really don’t think the author has made a compelling argument that Twitter and Facebook can even be compared (apples and oranges). However, if you are looking for something that bridges the long divide between these two disparate applications, you might want to look at Tumblr (www.tumblr.com). Tumblr is a type of microblogging application that includes the ability to blog about web pages (URLS), video, photos, quotes, audio and even chat convos in addition to just textual updates. On top of that it also allows one to “follow” the posts of another like Twitter. You can post to your Tumblr account from your cellphone, IM, or numerous desktop apps in addition to using the web interface.
I would be worried about posting articles like this because I fear you will really loose your credibility in the eyes of people who actually understand social networking. To think that Twitter is even close to Facebook is a laughable. Is twitter hot right now? yes. The funny thing is that 2007 might have been the year that you felt Facebook was hot, but you were wrong. The HUGE mistake older (older = graduated college prior to 2004) are making is that they did not see how facebook was really used. I have no problem saying this and standing by my word. FACEBOOK will never die. Why? Because unlike twitter, friendster, myspace, etc, FACEBOOK is the one site that you need while you are in college. Every year a new group of freshman come to campus millions of sign ups occur (if they don’t currently have an account from high school) It might be hard for the old people reading this to understand but a FACEBOOK account in college is more important that an email account.
Then when all these new generation FB students graduate they have that valuable communication site to keep contact with all the people they shared the “greatest time” of their life with.
Twitter is a nice service but FACEBOOK is a utility that our generation can not live without.
– mind generation gap (there are privacy and other settings on both service)
– everyone is marketer (megatrend)
– petitions (facebook users for developers ears, still won’t give up using it)
I am both twitter and facebook user.I use twitter to update followers and it syncs with my facebook status. I love facebook groups, event, marketplace, messaging service, album comments, and warbook (facebook social gaming app).
I hate hugs, superpoke, fun wall, and other not relevant stuffs.. ignore them all.
facebook can be a personal CRM
Facebook is a world of itself. Will always redefine itself.
Twitter is not the next Facebook. Twitter is a part of what will be the next web revolution: real-time. Qik follows the same path, and soon we’ll get a bunch of tools helping us communicating in real-time with a network of contacts…
Twitter is not the next Facebook. Twitter is a part of what will be the next web revolution: real-time. Qik follows the same path, and soon we’ll get a bunch of tools helping us communicating in real-time with a network of contacts…
twitter is completely useless
twitter is completely useless
great article. i don’t think we are a society who needs everything immediately. you get the most out of twitter when you follow people that interest you, but as the whole experience/conversations evolve (“alive”) it is impossible to always keep track – and it’s ok to miss out on a few tweets now and then! Twitter is for people who want everything now.. and those who aren’t afraid to miss something (read everyone except ‘traditional social networkers’)
I really just wanted to be number 55!! But I do agree Seb – but I don’t know whether Twitter is ‘it’ either. I dont know why I am persevering with Facebook – just for completeness I guess. I notice that kids have given up on it – traffic went down in the UK last month and I dont think is was a one-off
I really just wanted to be number 55!! But I do agree Seb – but I don’t know whether Twitter is ‘it’ either. I dont know why I am persevering with Facebook – just for completeness I guess. I notice that kids have given up on it – traffic went down in the UK last month and I dont think is was a one-off
It seems that twitter should be a small addition to facebook,
After all on facebook you can also add this famous people as your friends and they can send you messages ,
Its a small difference I am not sure it will be that popular in the end since its a bit artifical why whould somone write what he thinks all the time and many other pepole would be intersted in knowing that,
I think that the success of twitter will be very short and mainly due to a massive advertisment campagin they are having now.