14 Comments »
Yesterday tons of people wrote that my description of Facebook’s new status API as a “Twitter killer” was absolutely ludicrous. They claim that I don’t understand the difference between Facebook and Twitter and how Twitter is much more than just status updates. Trust me, I fully understand the difference between the two services. I would argue that the ability to “follow” people you aren’t connected to and the ability to @ reply (”at reply”) to other users is just a feature.
Since the majority of people think that Nick’s smoking crack for calling Facebook’s new API a “Twitter Killer”, I’ve decided to outline the blueprint of a product that duplicates Twitter’s features yet uses Facebook as a backbone for each of these status updates. I’m going to call this product “FB Tweet” but you can call it whatever you want. I began programming it but decided that I was only putting my existing projects aside and ultimately it’s not worth the time for me personally.
Whoever decided to take the day or two to make this product will be rewarded for taking the time as it will surely generate a ton of buzz.
Is There A Need for “FB Tweet”?
Any good product must satisfy the needs of the user and the first question to ask is if there is a need for a Twitter replacement. I’ve made some fundamental assumptions that suggests there is a need but feel free to argue otherwise. The average user probably wouldn’t switch products because they are fine using products that they’ve spent the time to learn how to use.
I don’t think Twitter users are average though. I think Twitter is still used by mostly early adopters. If Twitter has in fact become mainstream then the odds of a “Twitter Killer” is much less likely. The need for a “twitter-like” product is clear but ultimately I would argue that much of what is provided by Twitter is simply a set of core features that can be easily replicated:
FB Tweet Features
- Public status updates - As one commenter put it yesterday, “FB = inner circle; Twitter = public party”. That’s no longer the case because status updates are now accessible to those outside your inner circle.
- Ability to reply via user aliases - Twitter’s identification system is one of user aliases. This is easy to duplicate in that you simply assign each Facebook user an alias through the FB Tweet product. I would force Facebook users to use their Twitter username (via basic Twitter authentication) or pick a username that hasn’t already been selected on Twitter.
- Open protocol for status update access - One of the most powerful components of Twitter is their open API. Developing an API isn’t very complicated if you are using a good development framework. For example RESTful APIs are native to Ruby on Rails, the development framework which Twitter was built on. Django, a powerful Python framework, also has a great module for building a RESTful APIs. If you want to develop a RESTful API in PHP (which is the language most Facebook developers use) then I recommend checking out this article.
- Unidirectional follow capabilities - This is was sets Twitter apart from Facebook. It’s the ability to follow somebody’s status updates without them confirming. FB Tweet resolves this issue by letting people use their existing Twitter user names but when the status is published in Facebook it will say “@Full Name, text of status update”.
- SMS Functionality - This is where FB Tweet will have some issues initially. While Facebook currently has SMS functionality within their API it’s not documented well and doesn’t work with all mobile phone carriers. If Facebook truly wanted a “Twitter Killer” to exist, they would have to improve their SMS API significantly.
Conclusion
While Facebook’s new status API will bring in a wave of new applications, the death of Twitter still requires the rapid development of a new product that is distributed through Facebook. Not all Facebook users understand why Twitter is so powerful, yet provided with a public timeline of their friends’ statuses, I believe they would rapidly begin to see the value.
Will Twitter disappear tomorrow? Probably not, but there’s a huge opportunity to duplicate the majority of the functionality provided to Twitter users directly to Facebook users. I would argue that this product would make it easier for Facebook users to understand what the power of a twitter-like product provides and help bring such a service to the mainstream.
Twitter clearly has an opportunity here though. They already have many of the features I’ve outlined but they don’t yet have the full Facebook integration that I described. At this point though, I still fervently believe that the status wars are not yet over and a new company could come into power.
Facebook is a joke in my opinion.
If you want to know why watch my movie in the link I submitted for this comment.
Stick with Google products and Twitter and you will be better off.
Have a productive week.
I can see how this new development might cut into Twitter’s popularity, especially with how many people currently use Facebook in comparison.
Nick, you really are getting this wrong. Not because facebook couldn’t do it, but because that is clearly not what they are trying to do.
Opening the status API wasn’t a move to combat Twitter. With facebook’s infatuation with twitter, it might be that they opened the API specifically because of twitter. If twitter wants to, they can now run facebook. If twitter integrates connect, they score 150 million users.
Basically facebook just gave everyone who wants it permission to do a better job than they have with status updates. It’s the perfect way to integrate the two services while allowing them to exist independently. Building on each others strengths, they can both grow off of each other.
Eric, after Facebook’s publicly documented failed acquisition attempt(s), this really feels like nothing less than a stab at Twitter. Zuckerberg has been considering this move for yonks - in fact, Facebook management would have made decisions on their status update API launch around the possible outcomes of the acquisition talks with Twitter.
Look at it this way; do you think Facebook would have opened with this iteration of the status update API if they had acquired Twitter?
>”I still fervently believe that the status wars are not yet over and a new company could come into power.”
Read: Backtrack and leave the door open on your earlier article that Facebook is set to sweep in as of right now and take the so-called “status war”…
I don’t say this to offend you personally Nick but come across as if you really seem to “have it in” for Twitter.
Neil, I don’t see how you think Facebook’s status updates are somehow now public after yesterday’s announcement.
The developers’ blog specifically says:
“Your application will have access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their friends that are currently visible to the active user.”
This doesn’t mean I can follow anyone on Facebook’s status with whom I am not friends, and it doesn’t mean anyone who is not my Facebook friend can see my status updates.
This does not make a Twitter killer and it is not the point of opening the APIs to status, links, notes, and video in addition to photos, which are already open. The point is to allow a Facebook user to see more of their Facebook friends’ info in other apps, and to be able to use other apps to feed info into Facebook.
As far as your proposed “FB Tweet” app goes, I am all for new ideas but yours is seriously not even half-baked. There’s no discussion about what the end product result would even be, beyond a vague concept that it’s a Twitter killer. How and why would all the Twitter users abandon their tool for this? And really, if FB Tweet were such a great idea, I’d think it might be worth continuing development on it over anything else you could be working on, especially if it would take only one or two days of work.
Twitter is certainly still an edge tool, in my opinion, used mostly by tech geeks like myself. The cool kids will never Twitter. Ever. Public openness, limited functionality, and no rich media go against everything that attracts the cool set and don’t even start with the average Joe. And no, no matter how cool any of us geeks are within our world, we are not cool by actual cool people standards.
Facebook is the tool for everyone, cool, average, even geek. It has its own user base and well it should. As everyone says, FB is family and friends, an intimate party in your own living room, and Twitter is a public place, a bar, at best a secluded section of a bar.
The two will coexist just fine and neither need worry about the other for any reason. Your attempts at prognosticating Twitter’s death are misdirected, if not appreciated.
Wow … Im really getting railed yet again here … Ill stop with the anti-twitter posts although they always seem to receive a lot of comments.
@Luis … I appreciate your critical analysis. You state:
“As far as your proposed “FB Tweet” app goes, I am all for new ideas but yours is seriously not even half-baked. There’s no discussion about what the end product result would even be, beyond a vague concept that it’s a Twitter killer. How and why would all the Twitter users abandon their tool for this? And really, if FB Tweet were such a great idea, I’d think it might be worth continuing development on it over anything else you could be working on, especially if it would take only one or two days of work.”
My app that I’m describing is literally a duplicate of twitter except using Facebook as the backbone. In regards to not being able to access the status you are incorrect. Once anybody joined the application you could follow them since the application has access to their status updates.
In regards to building the app … maybe I will but as you know, Twitter doesn’t have a business model and nor does this one. I’m going to opt to continue working on the business I’m currently building
Nick, I did a quick test and I can confirm what the documentation say, and what some of comments mentioned above that the status messages are ‘not’ public. You can only pull status messages of friends of the currently logged in user.
This could become a possibility….
i really hope it kills twitter
thanks nick
Wow, I guess I’ll throw out the minority response (albeit belatedly) and agree with Nick…completely. A FB-Tweet app would potentially be hugely popular and further the ability to make personal connections - which is supposedly the point of Twitter but I think gets lost in its current form. Right now the gulf between FB users and Twitter users is enormous. But status updates on FB are largely pointless. A combo might encourage users to provide useful information through their FB updates that would thus encourage followers and, ultimately, improve opportunities for networking. I use both services and really love the potential of this idea. Thanks for the post and follow-ups.
What about integration with other services though? Part of the reason Twitter is so popular because it is dead simple to add to your blog, etc. Facebook on the other hand is a different matter. I’ve been struggling to implement Facebook Connect on my blog for days now and it’s nowhere near as simple and elegant as Twitter.
I am intrigued by this development and will reserve my opinion until this is out in the wild. Personally I think that this has a lot of potential and with third party applications hopefully we will see a lot of innovation.
@David Wang have you tried Disqus using Facebook Connect?
http://blog.disqus.net/2008/12/23/facebook-connect-now-available-on-disqus/
If I understand your system correctly a Facebook user would post public status updates under an alias, lets say @clown . Would @clown’s Facebook friends be able to identify him by his Facebook name?