Just over a month ago, ex-Facebook platform program manager announced that he was leaving the company to pursue new opportunities. That new opportunity appears to be over at Twitter as he tweeted about the new move earlier this morning. Given Josh’s extensive knowledge of Facebook’s strategy and product development process, this is most definitely a big hire for Twitter.
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Yesterday we first wrote about the upcoming Bing integration with Facebook, however at the time we were expecting the launch of the service to be imminent. Instead, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, told the Telegraph that “We should have our public updates integrated into a Bing beta within a couple of months. Unlike Twitter’s data stream, which is already totally public, we have to be very careful about making sure the correct data is streamed.”
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A little over six months ago, we performed a comparison of the top users on Facebook and Twitter and the number of fans and followers on each. Six months later, the top Twitter users have experienced a 500 percent growth in their follower base whereas Facebook fans have grown by approximately 200 percent. Facebook however has a much greater overlap, a continuing trend that we saw a few months ago. Below, are charts of the top 50 users on each site and the number of followers or fans on the competing site.
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Last week we finished up the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program and while some people may or may not have reached the 3,000 fan target, the real question is: does the number of fans really matter? Last night I was watching a video of Seth Godin where he says “it’s worthless to have lots and lots of friends on Facebook.” With so many people selling the importance of having fans, followers, and friends though, how could Seth Godin, a thought leader in marketing, make such an assertion?
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Last week we wrote about Facebook’s new tagging functionality but as of this afternoon the feature finally went live. While the functionality is no different than initially described, many users are finding that this transforms the overall user experience. There are also many objects on Facebook which still can’t be tagged with applications and pages such as photos. You also can’t include tags within Facebook messages but I’d expect more robust tagging functionality to be added over the coming weeks and months.
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This evening, Facebook began fully promoting the new Twitter syncing tool via the top of Facebook Pages and are encouraging page admins to sync with Twitter. With millions of page administrators (which still appear to be a fraction of all users), this new tool promotion will also serve as a significant promotion for Twitter in general. At this point the service is well known but by launching the product internally and making people say “Why’d they do that?”, Facebook is in essence using Twitter to keep their own company honest.
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This evening Facebook has announced the launch of the “Twitter exporter tool” for Facebook Page administrators. As Jaime Schopflin Hall highlights in an email to the press, “the tool allows Facebook Page administrators to automatically syndicate content and information they publish on Facebook to Twitter without leaving Facebook.com”. This tool was previously tested out and spotted via a Twitter update by Blake Ross, a Facebook employee, but then was later removed.
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This afternoon Twitter announced that geolocation data would now be added to users’ tweets. It’s something that Facebook has actually been discussing for some time off and on but adding such a feature to all feed stories isn’t the easiest process. In the meantime Facebook is still trying to adjust their platform to provide greater access to information. It’s essentially the “out opening” of Twitter, a similar strategy that Google attempted, starting with OpenSocial.
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Today there has been a fair amount of buzz today about Marc Andreesen’s comment, stated during an interview about his new venture fund, that Facebook should surpass $500 million in revenue this year. It’s not quite a surprise but what’s more interesting is that the company is on the fast track to billions while Twitter, the thorn in Facebook’s side, has yet to bring in any substantial revenue although a few initial advertisers have been buzzed about.
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I was in the process of writing a post today about the new ability that Facebook’s adding for users and Mike Arrington of course beat me to the punch. Mike is calling it the “Everyone Button” and while I can’t confirm that an “Everyone Button” is how it will be implemented, I can confirm that Facebook will be launching a tool to let users post public status updates. I’ve also heard that users will be able to subscribe to the public status feed of users, in a model that’s similar to Twitter.
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