Twitter: Facebook’s News Feed for People over 25
April 6, 2007
The technorati are going insane about the website Twitter these days. It’s all people can talk about. It’s driving me nuts! One thing that i keep asking myself is, isn’t Twitter is just the same as Facebook’s status indicator and news feed? If you don’t know about this feature in Facebook, here’s what it is…
When you log on to Facebook, there’s a little window where you can write what you’re doing. The home page for each user is something called a “news feed” which displays what all your friends are doing. This could be their status that they’ve typed in, a change in their profile, a new message, etc.
Kids on facebook have been using this feature A TON, everyday, all the time. Twitter does the exact same thing – except that it is ONLY the status description as you can’t do anything else on the site. Facebook is mostly used by people under 25 and it is used frequently. So basically Twitter took one (of the hundreds) of features of facebook and made a site around it for people over the age of 25. Not a bad idea, but doesn’t seem worthy of all the hubbub.
What do you think?
Entry Filed under: facebook, internet, social networks, web2.0. .
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1.
embee | April 7, 2007 at 5:20 pm
I have to get somethinf off of my chest first. The FB is for people who are younger than 25? I’m turning 27 soon and yes I kind of noticed the average is kind of swaying towards early 20’s, but I feel old now after reading your post
Anyway, I’m a twitter user as well and I didn’t think of the common ground between both websites that way before..
Interesting though..
2.
Philip Johnson | April 10, 2007 at 10:39 pm
This is too funny…I was just getting sick of all the Twitter hype and then I thought…well, wt f-ing f—it’s just like Facebook’s newsfeed. So I typed “twitter” and “facebook” into Google…and viola!….here I am. Anyways, I totally agree. It’s annoying. It’s like the older generations (>30s) finally have can do what AIM’s and MSN’s away message capabilities have been doing for years….and what Facebook has been doing in the online community world for the past year. So…should I stop looking for a reason why I need to be using Twitter? I guess I still haven’t decided. Because, hey, those who will interview me when I graduate have a greater chance of having a Twitter account than a Facebook account. My guess of what will happen: Facebook buys Twitter. For the same reason Google bought YouTube: they both did the same thing, but one just did it better.
3.
Mike Lewis | April 10, 2007 at 11:00 pm
except YouTube had a ton of users and traffic and Google Video didn’t. In this case, FB has way more users and traffic than Twitter does. I think they’ll just watch twitter and implement any good features they come up with. Of course, it won’t be many b/c twitter is just watching facebook. I think what will happen is that many other sites will begin to offer this “status” feed and then twitter will get bought by some other company that doesn’t understand social features but wants a web presence, like Comcast or People magazine, and then it will promptly be forgotten – if it doesn’t go out of business first.
4. Links for Saturday [2007-04-14] | April 14, 2007 at 11:01 am
[...] Twitter: Facebook’s News Feed for People over 25 « MPL?s Blog – Why Twitter sucks balls. [...]
5.
Chris | May 29, 2007 at 8:18 pm
I loved twitter at first, but they have been down a lot and it’s difficult to find people. Initially, I liked Jaiku.com because you can add feeds to it so that it is more of a general web activity update (a mini tumbler.com, perhaps), but Jaiku’s update-via-sms never authenticated on my phone.
I think twitter will pass and Jaiku will pass and we’ll be left with Facebook, which just redefined the definition of open. Pretty cool.
6.
Facebook Will Take Over The Web « MPL’s Blog | June 15, 2007 at 4:41 pm
[...] News Feed. RSS is a simple concept. It is publish/subscribe. You subscribe to get information from certain sources and updates to those sources are published to you. RSS readers are doing this for the web such as Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo, and the Google Reader (which is what i use). Just as your email inbox is a place for receiving mail messages, RSS readers are a place to receive messages from the web that you’ve signed up for whether it is a blog or a website. Facebook has an activity RSS reader called “News Feed” which displays any activity of a friend of yours on your home page. Most people don’t realize it’s RSS, but that’s essentially what it is and instead of delivering web messages, it delivers your friends’ activity. That is social and this feature alone is what makes facebook better than any other social network. It is great at telling you what your friends and network is doing and that is always relevant. I also wrote about this a few weeks ago here. [...]