Speaking of Twitter initiatives, Facebook did a major redesign recently and the thing looks like Twitter now. Far be it from me to criticize other people’s site redesigns (my official stance with any redesign is “you’ll get over it”), but it seems strange to me that a site with 175 million users is so scared of a site with 6 million that it destroys what made Facebook unique to become an imperfect copy of Twitter. Twitter content is actively updated. You say to yourself “I haven’t told everyone what kind of cream cheese I ate on my bagel today”, and you update your Twitter status so everyone knows. Facebook content on the other hand is secondary activity created when you try to do something like look up old friends, contact people, friend them, confirm party attendance, zombie bite them, whatever (with the exception of status updates, but that’s only one piece of the functionality). Facebook content for the most part consists of secondary information about what you’re doing on Facebook. Its the ripples in the pool as you move around. Twitter content IS what you’re doing. Twitter is the actual swimming – you have to take the strokes. This distinction is important because intentional content creation has to be sustained. Secondary content creation is a side affect and just happens. You may have noticed that the vast majority of people don’t have anything interesting to say. They may eventually get Twitter accounts and they may update but the content sucks and no one cares. Far more people are going to be doing what they’re doing on Facebook for far longer — assuming (and this is the important bit) that Facebook doesn’t fark up and forget what the hell people were on Facebook to do in the first place… Whoops, too late.
From Drew Curtis, of Fark.com. I think this illustrates Facebook vs. Twitter very nicely, and why Facebook’s new redesign is a bit weird.
