

Blindly speculating on Twitter’s future - k33l0r
http://www.marco.org/2012/08/02/twitter-speculation

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waterlesscloud
I think Facebook is fine. For all the yammering about how going public is
forcing them to change, the reality is that FB is just doing what FB has
always done- trying things out and promoting their vision of sharing. Some
plans work, some don't, but it's nothing to do with chasing revenue. Lazy
common wisdom narrative is lazy.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems like it's destined for a crash. Not yet,
they haven't pissed off the users yet, but they're headed in that direction.
They're clearly taking control of how tweets are consumed with a plan to make
them more annoying via revenue seeking. It's going to be a mistake.

Facebook has tremendously strong user lock-in, which people here tend to
dramatically underestimate. It's a true social network of people with mostly
real-world ties. Moving people off that will have to take place en masse or it
won't happen.

Twitter, though, has very very weak lock-in. Unlike FB, the most use of
Twitter comes from a small number of accounts. The entire service is driven by
a handful of percent of the users. If they leave, the service is dead. And
they'll go whereever they can build an audience.

Google+ stands to gain from Twitter's missteps, and that's where they should
be aiming. G+ has zero hope of taking on FB, but they could siphon off Twitter
completely once Twitter starts pissing off the few users who matter there.

~~~
untog
Facebook also has a huge personal history for each user- photos, etc. While
Twitter does too, I don't know anyone that cares about their past tweets as
much as their past photos.

