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Yesterday the Facebook and CNN partnership broke online records with over 1.5 million status updates posted through the CNN site and over 21.3 million video streams according to the New York Times. It was an impressive showing and it provided a taste of what is to come in the future of interactive television.
One site that didn’t receive as much buzz as normal was Twitter which saw a 500 percent increase in the rate of “tweets” per second according to according to Caroline McCarthy. It was surprising that less was mentioned about Twitter this time around, although I did happen to see promotions for news anchor Twitter accounts on CNN during the inauguration.
What both Facebook and Twitter appear to be jockeying for is to become the leading “live conversation platform”. Twitter no doubt provides an extremely effective platform for live conversation and with robust APIs, it makes it even easier to integrate Twitter into one’s site. Facebook Connect has proven to be effective in this latest implementation though and with a much larger user base, it would easily beat Twitter when competing to provide the backbone for any live conversation tool on the web.
If Facebook’s massive user base isn’t enough of an incentive for choosing them over Twitter, the site’s massive image of the social graph should be. Experiencing history in real-time with all of your friends is a much more powerful proposition than simply viewing “tweets” from al the interesting people you follow on Twitter. Conversely, one could argue that if you are truly following “interesting” people on Twitter, their live updates could be much more interesting than your Facebook friends.
Whichever tool you prefer there is no doubt that the two companies are competing to become the future online conversation platform. As CNN’s implementation of Facebook Connect proved, it’s much more effective to implement integration with an existing community than to build your own community when offering a platform for real-time conversation.
I’m sure that open identity evangelists would say that users should be able to login no matter what platform they have a preference for. When Facebook has over 150 million users though (and soon to be over 160 million) it’s hard to argue that the Facebook brand doesn’t add more credibility to anybody who decided to integrate with it. Do you think Facebook will win the race to become the de-facto live conversation platform on the web?
While I use both services, I do think that Facebook has the advantage here. After all there is very little difference between status updates on Facebook and “tweets.”
You can even filter your Facebook feed by status updates…and have nested comments…which Twitter does not have.
Unless Facebook drops the ball somehow, I’m having a hard time seeing how they can lose this battle.
But who knows?
the adaptionrate of facebook connect is astonishing! it seems they have a clear lead over friend connect. at least based on the sites that i browse. its about time that google speeds up their social intentions if they want to stay in that game
Wouldn’t it be great if we could have online conversations without boundaries? Some applications allow us to post simultaneously to Twitter, Facebook, and more, but there must be a way to make online conversation even more seamless…
I think they both have their advantages. I also use both and have my tweets going to my Facebook page to share with others.
I have gathered so many reources from Twitter that I could not have in Facebook, but I may be missing something in Facebook. I think they can peacefully coexist!
I still think twitter should have taken the merger with Facebook. At the moment, adding the twitter app on facebook makes the two fairly integrated, but deep integration via the acquisition would have been awesome. I worry that twitter will just lose as facebook fills in the gaps and their massive user base takes over.
I see “CNN.com Live with Facebook” is still working today. Was yesterday the launch of a new collaborative news viewing platform???
I used CNN/Facebook yesterday and loved it. I didn’t look at Twitter at all. Having streaming video right next to scrolling comments made it very convenient.
The one disadvantage was that after I had spent a day commenting on what I had seen on CNN, my daughter and son-in-law showed me their Facebook news feeds and my comments dominated. I thought Facebook would not give them every comment I made. (My Facebook newsfeed only provides a snapshot of who is saying and doing what. If I want to see what all my Facebook friends are saying, I have to run Live Feed.)
So there is the potential that those of us who want to chat away during a live event may overwhelm Facebook people who only want to hear from us occasionally. I realize they can adjust their settings to limit the number of messages from some individuals, but that doesn’t work so well when the messages increase and decrease based on intermittent events.