
Facebook Flips The Switch On Real-Time Search, Goes After Twitter Where It Hurts - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-flips-the-switch-on-real-time-search-goes-after-twitter-where-it-hurts/
======
blhack
I'm sorry, and I think I'm not the only one that feels this way, but facebook
is pretty much completely dead to me. Twitter has supplanted it.

Twitter is great for exactly the reason that most people hate it. It fills the
void while I'm sitting in line at Fry's or something; I can immediately see
what some of my friends are doing simply by looking at my blackberry, as well
as give them totally pointless updates like "omg I HATE THE LINES AT FRY'S!"
(you can see all of my stupid, inane tweets here:
<http://www.twitter.com/blhack>).

Facebook also just feels like there is _too_ much going on...twitter does
exactly one thing and it does it very well.

For instance, I have a really fantastic pocket knife that a good friend bought
me a few years ago. It has all sorts of tools, one of them is a screwdriver.
Needless to say, it is not as good as...well...a screw drive. Facebook's
status updates, and twitter's "tweets", while similar, just aren't really the
same thing.

Finally, there are a few people that I "stalk" on twitter that most likely
have no idea who I am. One of them is a Poet from the UK...I get to see things
like "I am release a few limited edition first run CDs from my original
demo...get them while they're hot" (he is actually a rapper...but got started
doing poetry jams. I feel dirty saying I follow a rapper). There is somebody
called "Yuffster" (I thinks she is a famous dev of some sort? I don't know
there was a post on here a while ago of "must-follow" twitterers and she was
one of them...actually she was the ONLY one I kept following, everybody else
tweeted like 100 times a day.)

Sorry, facebook, but you have lost my eyeballs. Twitter offers a superior (and
pretty much completely different) product.

~~~
evgen
Twitter and Facebook are targeting different needs and communities, whether
they know it or not. With Facebook you can find out what your friends are
doing, but not much else. This is great for people who have a small and
cohesive social network that largely communicates among its own members (e.g.
young people.) Twitter is more of a broadcasting platform; you can learn what
your friends (and random people you follow) are eating for breakfast, but you
can also get the latest news out of Iran or the most recent viral meme that
everyone will be blogging about tomorrow. Everyone seems to think "real-time
updates" is a single category, but Twitter and Facebook each seem to be better
at different facets of this info stream and I am not sure that either will
make much of an inroad into the other one's turf.

------
TweedHeads
I don't want to search what my sister ate this morning, I find more important
what peers are working on and what they have to say about new technologies or
even tech trivia.

Twitter wins.

~~~
whughes
Twitter wins _for you_. A critical distinction. I don't see the value in
Twitter on its own, especially for a technical audience. Why not just use RSS
feeds? Facebook's network is its major appeal, and that applies to everyone,
not just techies.

