This is my home on the web. I founded Gradspot.com, recently launched DermTV.com, advise start-ups, program websites, and love few things in life more than building stuff. You can follow everything I do here on stuartschultz.com, or certain things on twitter, and other things on facebook.
Facebook has finally done it: opened up a portion of their content/activity-stream to outside developers through a new API. But what does it really mean to the Internet eco-system? And why is everyone putting this into context with Twitter?
Unmistakably, this move coupled with fB’s recent homepage/fan-page redesign, was a challenge to Twitter. But will it work?
I’m not sold. Because there’s still one glaring difference: privacy.
fB was built around the concept of sharing your life — or your projection of it — with a “close” group of friends. Thus, whatever you say, post, etc. is shared and accessible only within your network. And I believe that even though you can make everything public, at least for one generation, this privacy and “group” concept has become part of fB’s offering’s ethos.
On the other hand, Twitter is built around transparency. And what does transparency enable? Conversation. Really far-reaching conversation.
People don’t really use Twitter to see that their aunt is cooking eggs for dinner. They use it to see what other people are talking about. Not only celebrities or thought leaders, but friends, family, and anyone they can find.
Which brings me to my next differntiator which still stands: the effectiveness of Twitter search. It’s pretty incredible. If you want to search for everyone who’s talking about the newest Banksy piece posted in the streets of London, you can. Just visit http://search.twitter.com/. And better yet, once you find them, you can immediately interact with them (which, by the ways, is opening the floodgates to spamming, but that’s another issue and algorithms can start to solve that problem).
Facebook, on the other hand, of course has a search feature, but even if you were to find those people talking about Banksy, you most probably couldn’t interact with them without friending them. It’s just not the Facebook way.
That’s not to say that Facebook or Twitter better and we should really stop comparing them. They have two completely different applications and I think they’ll both be around for a long time (unless Facebook opens up completely, but it never can).
So today’s change will just mean that some cool new fB mashups and clients will be arriving shortly, but everyone will still be Twittering.
