

Facebook: FarmVille is bigger than Twitter - mun411
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/facebook-farmville-is-bigger-than-twitter-655373

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Tawheed
I think this comparison shows a fundamental difference between Facebook and
Twitter. Twitter is really trying to find a use-case and serve a purpose that
in some way adds to the productivity of this planet. Whereas Facebook's goal
seems to suck as much of people's time as possible by having them do menial
activities, while turning a profit. While the two companies may be in the same
"industry" -- they certainly have very different missions (I think), whether
they realize it or not.

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mixmax
And most importantly - Farmville actually has an income model....

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johndevor
"...and 1.4 million photos are uploaded a second."

I hope that's not true. ;)

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unalone
Wait. Why not? Why the winky face? I'm confused by your statement.

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johndevor
1.4 million photos per second. If you turn that into per day it's 1.69e11
photos (you write out the zeros).

That's just not possible.

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tome
Close. It's 120 billion per day. And with 250 million Facebook users that's
500 photos per user per day. That sounds rather a lot.

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johndevor
From facebooks own statistics page:

"More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month"

<http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>

I don't know where the article got their statistics.

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ct
Both are fads. Give it another year and we'll be onto another FB app and
another social network website that lets you only send 80 characters at a time
(it fits into a nice *nix console window!)

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DanielBMarkham
Facebook, and I say this with great admiration, is the devil.

First they use your friends to suck you into joining the site. Then they amuse
all of your bored friends with games, then they use the games to get those
same friends to lure in more FaceBook users and to market/sell things to
people already there.

It's referral marketing taken to the nth degree. It's been obvious to me for
some time now that it has more legs than Twitter, now it looks like it has
more volume (and a better business model) as well.

(sigh)

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ThomPete
"The company also noted that one of its apps, 'Farmville', is more popular
than its major rival in the social-networking world – Twitter."

Say what? How on earth is a game a competitor to Twitter?

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nooneelse
The "its" in "its major rival" is facebook not farmville. They are saying that
even some non-central and fully disposable part of facebook has more users
than twitter.

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FreeRadical
This reminds me of Microsoft saying they will 'grow another Google' over the
next few years (a few years ago). At the time Microsofts market cap was
c.$250bn and Google's was $100bn. Now the Microsoft market cap is $264bn and
Google is $186bn.

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notauser
Bing might actually be heading towards a major slice of the search engine
market.

Right now everyone's browser defaults to Google search. Partly this is because
most people still have Win XP and when they got those the default (Windows
live search) was horrible. There was a reason to switch to Google.

These days Bing's results are good enough that most normal people wouldn't
bother to change their browser default if it was set to Bing.

Thanks to the good publicity it's been getting in the main stream media it
looks like a _lot_ of people are going to upgrade to Win 7, including the
crowd of late-adopters that stuck with XP.

All of these people will get Bing by default with their new install/computer,
and a lot of them won't bother to change it.

A box you type in to get search results when you open the Internet window?
Yep, I can 'google' from here. It would take a bad experience to drive these
users to change their home page to Google again.

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apgwoz
And if you see google as a search company, than this is ba news. Too bad they
are an ad company.

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notauser
A drop in search volume doesn't impact their content network ads, you are
correct.

However I don't think Microsoft will let Google buy space on Bing to place
their ads. Therefore a drop in search volume leads to a cut in ad revenue.

Even if placement on Bing for ad words was possible Google would have to give
Microsoft a cut - right now they keep 100% of search revenue (minus operating
costs). Unless Bing is substantially cheaper to run than Google that would
work out badly for revenue per ad.

Worst of all from their perspective a drop in search volume would lead to a
loss of opportunity to push news, gmail, youtube and especially maps/local
search. These related properties must be benefiting heavily from their top
placement in Google search results.

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rwhitman
My mom doesn't get Twitter. My mom f-ing LOVES FarmVille. 'Nuff said.

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c00p3r
Why not? Farmville is both useless and stupid, while Twitter is just useless.
People favor stupid time pass.

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nailer
Quick textbites from people I'm interested in, that I can read at a glance
from my pocket whenever I'm bored, are not useless.

If you don't understand the appeal of that I don't really think you understand
Twitter.

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Tichy
The number of people on earth taking a dump every day is also bigger than the
number of users of Twitter.

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richardburton
Comparing FarmVille and Twitter is like trying to compare blunt hammer to a
swiss army knife. A hammer is fun for doing simple, satisfying things like
banging in nails and smash old glass window pains. Twitter, on the other hand,
is like networking on acid - it's incredible & there's so much more you can do
with it.

