Facebook has a problem. One of its main goals now is to be the center for sharing everything on the web, but the key to that is to make the process as quick and easy as possible. And in that regard, its rival Twitter destroys it. That’s a problem.
Now, Facebook isn’t in any immediate danger because of this, it can coast on its sheer size (300 million users). But eventually, if those users find their way to Twitter, I would bet that they’ll start sharing more there, because it’s just so much easier. And while ease and speed may be what the user cares about, traffic is what publishers care about. And despite being much larger, Facebook also loses that battle to Twitter.
A Tale Of Two Buttons
The reason I bring this up is because this weekend, TechCrunch installed a new Facebook Share button on every article, next to the Tweetmeme Retweet button. When we first installed it, we set the Facebook button up with the default settings that included a share count, and the ability to pop open a new window to complete the share. These default settings are awful.
The first time I clicked on the Facebook button to test it out, I could not believe how long it took to populate the information to share. I did some tests, comparing it to the retweet button. Assuming you’re logged in to both Facebook and Twitter already, the Tweetmeme retweet button takes about 2 seconds to send your shared message over to Twitter.com, which you then send by hitting “Update.” So let’s say the total time is about 3 seconds to share.
With the Facebook button, it took quite a few seconds to load this new small window. And then it took another few to post the shared information to my wall. Also, the Facebook functionality attempts to pre-populate a picture from the post you are sharing. That’s a good idea in theory, but it’s almost always the wrong picture, so that’s another few seconds to cycle through those to find one (or get rid of it). So we’re looking at a total share time of 10 to 15 seconds.
While 10 to 15 seconds may not seem like a lot of time, compared to Twitter’s 2 to 3 seconds, it’s an eternity. And people who use both services will realize this (whether it is consciously or not), and I believe it will push them towards using Twitter more as their main sharing outlet.
And the gap is actually much larger if you’re logged out of both services to start. With Twitter, it takes a couple seconds max to sign in. With Facebook, it can take anywhere from several seconds, up to 30 seconds in my experience. All of this wasted time adds up, and it really disuades me from using Facebook to share things.
Another inexcusable time suck on Facebook’s end is caused by the pulling of the share count. Tweetmeme seems to do this on its button without much problem (though their count is sometimes off). With Facebook, it is another barrier to sharing because it slows the whole process down. Seeing this, our dev team made some changes to the button almost immediately. They removed the count number to reduce load time, and also got rid of the pop up window functionality. Instead, now when you hit the button, it will populate the information in a regular new browser window or tab. The result, is much, much faster (though still not Twitter fast).
A Need To Connect
Facebook does have a weapon that Twitter does not right now: Connect. A core idea behind Facebook Connect is that you can share things to Facebook (and back) without having to manually share them. That’s interesting, and eventually will be very powerful, but it’s still is nowhere near its potential. And the truth is that I’m not even sure Twitter needs a Connect of its own because third-party development community that keep pumping out sites and services that continue to feed the Twitter sharing machine.
Those same developers have not been doing that for Facebook because Facebook until very recently would not supply them with the type of developer support they needed for these third-party sites outside of Facebook proper. And now even with some (but not full) support, developers are not creating the same type of app ecosystem around (again, not inside) Facebook, that they have for Twitter. This limits the sharing pipeline for Facebook.
Facebook also has its Import functionality that users can use to auto post things like stories from Digg, Flickr photos they post, YouTube videos they favorite, and even blog posts they write. But this feature is horribly slow, and laughably unreliable. It was basically trying to offer much of what FriendFeed does, but it is worse in every way possible. Hopefully now that Facebook has bought FriendFeed, that will change.
Sharing Is Caring
Facebook recently added the “Everyone” button functionality and revamped its bookmarklet. To me, both of those signal Facebook’s desire to be the central place for sharing content on the web. Unfortunately, neither of these did anything to improve the speed of sharing.
There’s something else that is often overlooked, but very key to this sharing of information: Facebook has no simple way to reshare items. To be fair, Twitter doesn’t really either, but its users dreamed up the retweet idea, and soon it will be fully baked into the product, with the launch of the Retweet API.
Users have chosen not to use Facebook status messages in the same way, and there is no method to reshare News Feed items. FriendFeed has a very obvious “Share” button on each item which allows you to repost an item, or share it elsewhere. But maybe even worse, Facebook also has no method like FriendFeed of having interesting items that users “like” bubble back up to the top of the stream. Sure, they have a “Highlights” area, but that’s really pretty weak. It’s all about the stream, and currently, once an items falls off of the first page of the News Feed, the likelihood that you will ever see it again, is slim.
Again, maybe the FriendFeed acquisition will help remedy these things. Or maybe Facebook will once again take a play from Twitter’s playbook (as it did with the @ syntax) and create some sort of reshare functionality.
Traffic Doesn’t Lie
Obviously, users are going to want a sharing process to be as quick as possible, but while publishers care about that too, their bottom line is different: Traffic. You might think that Facebook would have the obvious advantage here since it’s much larger than Twitter, but you’d be wrong.
As we shared back in June, Twitter is in our top five referrers. Facebook? Not even on the list.
Actually, they are on the list, but farther down it. While Twitter is #3 or #4 (depending on the month), Facebook is more like #6, #7, or even as low as #10. And the gap between the two is pretty wide. That’s fairly remarkable for a site that is much, much smaller (Twitter) to be already easily beating its bigger rival (Facebook).
Maybe the new Facebook button will change that, but if I had to bet on it, I would say that it won’t. And I believe that speaks to the fact that it’s much easier to share on Twitter than it is on Facebook. And while it may not be a huge problem right now for them, it’s something I’d be taking very seriously. Speed and ease in sharing are only going to become more important in an increasingly social web.
Twitter & FB aren’t competition.
Most people use them to connect with different groups of people. I bet. Do a poll.
true to a certain extent, but that difference is rapidly blurring. and that’s what facebook wants.
Maybe Twitter is in your top referrers because the only people who use Twitter are the TechCruncherati, and the rest of the world that uses Facebook just doesn’t care about your Silicon Valley gossip rag.
Agreed. Facebook is phenomenally larger than Twitter.
FB is about REALLY connecting to people, people who grow to be your friends or already your friends. Twitter is about sharing available information to a mass whom you know only by their updates. The scope of reach maybe larger, but real connectivity would be less happening.
Also, you get to know more about about your Twitter friends when they become your FB friends. (I bet Zuckerberg would love this).
Maybe, we can look at from this angle to find out which is worthy – which account details would you be willing to share easily, FB or Twitter? I guess many would be willing to lose the latter if forced to choose between two…
If FB is more worthy, I wonder whether users speed of share would have an impact. As said by Tyler, “Most people use them to connect with different groups of people.” Do a poll.
Not so sure about that. I and most people I know have very different Facebook and Twitter connection sets, and I don’t see them converging any time soon. FB is for people I met in real life and am somewhat friendly with, with privacy settings that are stratified by degree of familiarity. Twitter is for people I find interesting, wherever they are, and there is no stratification.
But Facebook is phenomenally larger than Twitter.
FB is about REALLY connecting to people, people who grow to be your friends or already your friends. Twitter is about sharing available information to a mass whom you know only by their updates. The scope of reach maybe larger, but real connectivity would be less happening.
Also, you get to know more about about your Twitter friends when they become your FB friends. (I bet Zuckerberg would love this).
Maybe, we can look at from this angle to find out which is worthy – which account details would you be willing to share easily, FB or Twitter? I guess many would be willing to lose the latter if forced to choose between two…
If FB is more worthy, I wonder whether users speed of share would have an impact. As said by Tyler, “Most people use them to connect with different groups of people.” Do a poll.
Are you moderating even useful comments on TC? My lengthy comment on Twitter-FB difference disappeared in less than 2 minutes!!!!!
It’s Marshall McLuhan all over. The medium is the message.
I just wonder if Wave will come along and truly unify all these streams. My hunch is that Twitter will start seeming more like AOL: super popular until suddenly the future passed it by.
If you see a Meg Ryan Twitter movie, watch out!
traffic to geek website like techcrunch, facebook doesnt serve.
i agree, share’s number facebook should count and tell.
The elephant in the room is of course Meebo, when their bar and sharing solution finally becomes open to the public…
Twitter will always be an echo chamber of sorts populated by true believers in Social Media. Facebook is way more comfortable and digestable to the next wave of social media participants. These next wavers are older, slower (in terms of actually using the technology) and don’t mind the extra few seconds if it means they get it right and understand what just happened. Twitter is confusing and uncomfortable to most people outside of the audience of this blog post. it will always be that way.
Nice post.
One thing about facebook is a does a better job of consolidating the same share/like into one post and off the main pipe. On Twitter it can be a little repetitive, less informed (behind a scary short url), and all that jazz . I still prefer twitter though because its more a raw pipe.
thanks. yeah rewtweet api will change that obviously. there will be less repetitive noise hopefully. of course, then users will complain about it and want the old way back.
I just hate the fact that in order to share on facebook you have to choose the image because it’s like the whole site is being loaded. You are right about it taking a long time. Twitter just simplifies things.
When you implement “Share on Facebook” on your website you should make sure that the preview is always correctly populated by the meta title, meta description and the primary image of your content you are sharing.
This is documented here:
http://www.face...re_partners.php
Too bad some developers don’t read the docs.
@TechCrunch: It won’t take 10-15 seconds to “Share on Facebook” because of the image selection if the link-tag for image is used, but maybe still the barrier is higher to share since you have to type your own personal comment to that short story generated. However I personally see that as a good thing and seems to fit the “Facebook-approach” nicely.
I got a USB stick connection and I spent up to 5 min. to share a news on fb, and only 5 secs to do the same in twitter…
fb should be worried about…
great symphonies, and famous storytellers changes during the times, noise doesn’t.
mg, theres about a 290 million use count difference between facebook and twitter. do you believe that facebook would allow them to migrate to twitter before adding killer features (like the everyone button)?
i’m just not sure the everyone button even makes a big difference. in my book it’s all about speed and ease of sharing, twitter destroys facebook in both of those.
Yes, if its speed of sharing, Twitter destroys FB. But is that the only thing for which people come to facebook? I DOUBT.
Yes, people come to Facebook and Twitter with diff purposes. Speed hardly pops in, I guess.
user*
Facebook’s been acting rather funky lately. The other day my account went in and out of being temporarily unavailable. And yesterday sometimes when i went to the homepage my news feed was alternating between full and being empty.
Nobody has ever done social networking at scale or feature-level as Facebook is doing. Don’t mean that as a defense of FB… but funky behavior is somewhat expected. It’s not the crash-and-burn of Friendster by any stretch of the imagination. And FB has largely spared people the slowdowns/growing pains that MySpace exhibited. Even technical people will forget just how hard it is to run a social media site like Facebook even at low scale, but at 300M it’s a feat.
Even if I have gripes about their UI I have been personally impressed by the ability to scale. You can’t just throw money at the problem, you have to be smart enough to do it. Also appreciate FB’s contributions back to FOSS community such as Hadoop/Hive.
Seeing as how often Twitter completely goes down, I’d say Facebook’s architecture is a lot more robust and scalable. It’s reliability is impressive for the amount of traffic it gets. I remembered MySpace used to go down all the time. Given how public and routine Twitter’s outages are, you’d think they would’ve fixed the problem by now. I suspect the site is sitting on a badly designed architecture and would require a significant re-design to make it performant and scalable.
I agree it’s impressive the level of scaling they’re doing, but still, aside from those particular issues, the site’s been rather screwy the past month or two.
I dont know MG, I use facebook for 3 years now and keep hearing about twitter for 2-3 years I guess, I have tried to use twitter many times, but I always go back to my facebook which I love so much and never think of leaving for 140 chars of twitter.
Good post.
But ultimately, as a user of both, my role is that of a curator.
I will be sharing only the right content with facebook friends regardless of how long or how few clicks it takes.. and in a separate process, I share and autopost (posterous) my shared items, to a twitter crowd that is less narrow.
Speed or extra clicks, you’re picking and choosing what goes where. speed would be a luxury.. but that already factors itself into fb’s growth anyway.
thanks, i’m pretty much the same way right now, but ultimately I do believe that facebook wants to be the center of shared content on the web for all – hence the everyone button, etc.
Facebook also has that horrendous system of messing with your links so that you go to a facebook page before leaving, which not only means more clicks, (more clicks = bad), but that damn intermediate page lags half the time, which makes everything more painful.
agreed. though that is to try and protect you.
Exactly, and I think that that’s where Twitter, for all its speed, fails. I would say that about half to three quarters of my Facebook friends list would not want to deal with the 140 character limit and its concomitant bit.ly URLs. All those things that slow down Facebook also make the content more engaging.
“All those things that slow down Facebook also make the content more engaging.”
Yes! And threaded commenting makes it easier for the average joe to follow. I’m certain facebook will start rebubbling things to the top of the wall when key people from your friend list interact with them (like FriendFeed does). This will make Facebook much more engaging as well.
MG, I still don’t know why you still insist on comparing Twitter and Facebook. They target two totally different markets. There might be some overlap, and that overlap might be growing, but different demographics nonetheless.
As for sharing, I personally find how Facebook shares content ininfinitely more than how Twitter does it. Much better than the 140 char limit with a potentially malicious shortened URL with no thumbnail preview. No threaded conversations on shared links. Sharing on Twitter is pretty useless without using a third party app or website. Even retweeting is not supported natively by Twitter! Twitter has evolved, for all intents and purposes, into a giant public database. It’s a dumb pipe for data, which is why trend tracking is so central to Twitter.
And that’s one of the fundamental differences between Twitter and Facebook: one is a service, while the latter is a website. Twitter is all about easy data access. That’s why sharing is so simple and basic. Once the data is in there, other sites/apps can present that data in whatever way they like. That’s why trend tracking is king on Twitter. On the other hand, as a website, Facebook is not keen to offer unrestricted access to its data. The drive is to get you to their website and view their ads. Facebook is best experienced on their website. They want to be a portal to the internet.
but I think that when it comes to sharing, they are very much going for the exact same thing: to be the central hub of shared content on the web.
yeah.. this is from your observations.. which count for almost nothing. Still don’t get how you can compare two things which are compleatly different. Facebook connects you with others, you can find old friends, upload albums etc. It’s not full of the crap that twitter users come up with only a hourly basis… Facebook status tends to be more informative, or something you’d actually care about. Not “HI, GUYS I NEED SOME ATTENTION – GIVE IT TO ME”
The reason he is comparing them is because that is what Facebook is trying to do, become the sharing platform for EVERYONE. You don’t see the difference because you view twitter as the sharing platform for everyone and Facebook as the sharing platform for friends. As long as Facebook is trying to become the sharing platform for everyone, MG should be comparing them!
…really?! Fb is not “full of the crap”??
75% status are simply… trash!!
I agree they are different, but also vodafone and google were different, and with G voice they gonna fight in the same field..
Just a year ago, I wouldn’t have guessed that these two services would go head to head. Neither did TechCrunch. Everyone was comparing Facebook to MySpace. Now MySpace is history and Twitter has entered the vernacular. I’ve almost abandoned Twitter before it becomes ‘cool’ though. The reason I’ve almost left is they resemble MySpace. The stream is becoming a mess and a breeding ground for spammers. There’s a consequence for becoming part of the 24 hour news cycle.
Are you guys using a 386? We use FB’s share links with default settings on several sites.
Results:
1.8 seconds Facebook Share (default settings).
2.4 seconds Tweet This.
And the resulting links are far more descriptive to Facebook viewers with automatic inclusion of a headline, summary, and image.
Seriously, I love Twitter (like I love Facebook status without Facebook), but someone needs to do the research – I would wager over 90% of it’s users have CS degrees. And I doubt it will expand significantly beyond that admittedly large enough niche.
He uses a Mac, might as well be a 386…
you think 90% of twitter users have CS degrees? um, have you used twitter in the past year? unless we consider bots to have CS degrees.
I did some small research few weeks ago and counted number of updates I receive from friends in one day from twitter and facebook. I compare that with number of users and it showed that twitter users are far more active than facebook. They update almost 5 times more than facebook users.
So even if FB have more users, twitter is beating them with quantity of updates.
This has the be the most ridiclious comment ever.. are you actually serious?!
Not sure how you pulled off that research.. “from friends” you don’t have any friends…
And even if you did that’d hardly represent the entire community… Take a look at how many images are being uploaded to FB monthly and you’ll see that just on image count it’s much, much more active than Twitter. Naive.
@mg: One of the most valuable tools any of us will ever have is the ability to step out of tech and look at things from a human perspective.
Bots aside, I maintain that 90% of actual, real, Twitter users have CS degrees, and it is my wild-arse instinctive guess that the niche is nearly penetrated.
The day after I posted that, Robert J Moore agreed with me here and backed it up with Statistics, which as we know never lie: (”Twitter’s growth is no longer accelerating”): http://www.tech...rs-perspective/
Twitter is the next engine for Real-Time news…
You can get updates about a Madonna concert and also see who won the Super-Bowl and the best part “Everything in Real-Time”.
Cheers,
Arbel
I re-shared a friend’s shared link on facebook just last night. So you can ‘retweet’ _some_ stuff, I guess.
Me too.
You seem to be missing the point here. Twitter is.. meh.. twitter.. Facebook is all about your friends. I tried twitter once and found it.. impressively boring. And honestly, people that use that Facebook Connect button? I’d rather not have them on my friends.
Regarding your HTTP referrer data, I can’t speak for the rest of TC readers, but I tend to share different links on FB and Twitter. I reserve my “nerd news” for Twitter, because my followers are other tech-savvy people in the industry. On FB, I post pretty much everything else from humour to politics. Based on past liking and comment trends, I can’t imagine half of my FB friends caring about tech news.
In fact, I somewhat feel guilty about all the links I post on FB. I feel like I’m spamming my friends in a way. I’m sure there are at least a few friends on FB that have blocked me from their wall…
Honestly, I was here an hour ago, and I didn’t even see the new button. Blue isn’t exactly a standout color either. I’m hoping that the friendfeed acquisition solves a lot of the problems you mention here too.
I use the Flock Browser to share things to Facebook and it takes no time at all.
For all but those who live and work in Silicon Valley I think there is a big difference between what their Facebook friends would enjoy and what their Twitter followers would.
So I suspect for most people that the choice between Twitter and Facebook for sharing isn’t and will never be about speed. Instead it is about the nature of the content and how appropriate it is for their friends and followers on FB vs. Twitter.
I find sharing photos and videos in Twitter such a task. Facebook is still best in sharing Photos and videos as you do not have to leave Facebook in order to see them.
Link sharing in Facebook is also good because it gives you an immediate preview of the content of the shared link, unlike in Twitter where sometimes, you are lead to a spam site.
They should definitely introduce a version of the Friendfeed reshare, I import all my shared entries from Friendfeed purely because the Facebook version is weak and the social network closed!
I ‘m gonna have to disagee with you MG. Facebook users, who mostly represent the mainstream, aren’t going to migrate to Twitter because sharing is faster there. Most people only use one or two social networking/bookmarking sites regularly. One is Facebook and the other is usually the site they used before Facebook. Most just don’t have enough time to use them, don’t care to engage more, or just don’t see why they should use something like Twitter (which they don’t understand anyway). Combine that with Twitter’s ever growing spam problem, virus issues, an unusually high user attrition rate, the leveling off of US based Twitter traffic and it doesn’t sound as striking as it was initially perceived. I do see some great possibilities for Twitter in the future but it is going to require a friendlier interface to abridge the attrition of users and make sure they just “get it” as soon as they sign up for an account.
facebook is really email 2.0.
how so?
by converting addressbooks to connection graphs, and by ridding messages of the to: field.
twitter still only has 1/2 of the ingredients.
excellent observations & article.
right on target.
i think at the moment FB has been focused more on user acquisition than activation/retention, which might be why this hasn’t gotten higher priority.
but i agree, share should be more visible, more prominent, faster to use.
thanks dave. i suspect they’ll remedy the discrepancy. seriously, they should just take friendfeed’s share bookmarklet right now to help short term.
You guys should consider placing the new facebook button at the base of the article in addition to the top. Right now the retweet link is in both places, while to share something to facebook from the base of an article requires you to open up the “share this” popup first. This adds a click, and gives twitter an unfair advantage with when comparing the effectiveness of these buttons.
hey, that’s not a bad idea…
Sharing fundamentally changes the content consumption experience of the internet because it allows those who we know/trust to curate a stream of information for us. For content creators this has many points of value, that’s why we created http://www.tweetiator.com so that you know who is tweeting your links and connect with them in real time.
Another case of Twitter myopia. I agree the FB sharing is slower from the page but the on-site sharing features are pretty solid and the FB Firefox toolbar makes it even simpler (and faster I’ve found.)
I read over the weekend about Twitter being a parallel web (Louis Grey?) People need to stop comparing Twitter and Facebook, its apples and oranges in terms of display, functionality, audience and end-game.
Agree with Dave Mc, FB has been dealing with things like developing entirely new systems to deal with their scaling issues, which is why micropayments, ads and a lot of other necessary stuff was put on the back burner.
That is not the case anymore.
FB is a toy, Twitter is a high value business tool/platform. I’m finding I use FB much less relative to Twitter. Maybe this will change once I retire but for now I couldn’t give a rats ass about FB Connect.
Twitter is much better for sharing. I think its #3 for our traffic while facebook is at #5 or 6 and that is only because we spend time on our fan page.
The thing is I still look at facebook in a different manner. I was on it from the beginning in 2004 and I go to it to see what friends are up to. I don’t pay any attention to the links being shared by other people. I want to see who written on my wall, photos from the weekend and what people are up to I havent seen in awhile. I use twitter to find articles to read and new resources.
For me there are completely different uses for the 2 sites making facebook not good for sharing.
*shrug* dunno what you’re talking about. It’s all relative based on your weakest link, you’re Internet connection, ISP, and routes.
For me, clicking on the retweet button and the share button both show up within seconds. The same amount of time for each one… this 10 second population that you mentioned is not seen by me.
I however never ’share on facebook’ I always share/retweet to Twitter, which then via a Facebook application, updates my Facebook profile.
Same here with the speed.
I feel like Twitter is a “share ALL information” portal. I am not really making a connection with people I know.
Facebook I am connecting with people I know, so I might not necessarily share ALL information, just information that I think my friends would enjoy.
I don’t really see Facebook and Twitter competing in all the same categories and for the most part I don’t see the point in really trying to make it seem like they are.
Agreed 100%.
We just deployed the Facebook share button on our blog, and the one setback, like you mentioned, is that it brings up a new page by default. The upside is that if people have been on Facebook sending messages between friends, they are familiar with the sharing interface, because it looks just like your inbox. Twitter, continuously, has confused it’s users with inconsistent design across new features, including the new UI overhaul.
Let me ask you this… Does all sharing need to be that quick? Some content such as breaking news, or very important type of updates, sure. But 80% or more of the status updates are of nothing substantial, such as someone taking a bite out of a sandwich. Most people can read that 2 hours later and it’s not a big deal. Even when the status update is of substance, it doesn;t need to necessarily be consumed immediately. I think real time is important but only for the small percentage of content that is updated.
They are totally different man
That’s like saying if twitter implemented more friend info, people would maybe use it for that instead of facebook.
Did your mod to fbshare.me end up breaking the whole comment info section? I can no longer see the writer name, number of comments, or the fbshare.me or tweetmeme share buttons. I’m using IE6.
According to our (AddToAny’s) aggregate stats, Facebook is the top sharing destination through our web widget and browser button. Email is second, Twitter is third.
You can see a recent chart here: http://www.labn...tatistics/9729/
A year ago Twitter was barely on the sharing graph and now they’re #2 when it comes to web apps, which says something. As far as post-share clicks / link reach, it’s no contest, Twitter dominates Facebook by a wide margin.
Facebook would need a major sharing overhaul to catch up to Twitter in this regard. It’s private versus public sharing, and since Facebook users are adapted to tight privacy controls, they would need to make sharing to “everyone” suddenly very compelling.
I suppose these things are subjective. I find the Facebook sharing feature much more powerful and elegant than Twitter. Occasionally, there have been performance problems – but Twitter has also had its share of issues in that arena.
Also – it isn’t surprising that Techcrunch gets more traffic from Twitter than Facebook considering its Twitter obsessed, tech-savvy demographic and the fact that every other post on Techcrunch is about Twitter. Other media organizations get way more traffic from Facebook – it just depends on the type of content that is posted.
Hi MG, There are some flaws with your article postulating you have more traffic on your site from twitter than FB based on the greater ease of sharing.
Asides the obvious point that the Twitter use base is more of your demographic, do you consider the fact that people have far less friends/followers of FB. TC for instance has 1,016,197 Followers on Twitter and 11,521 fans on FB. This of has a major effect of how you get traffic.
Cheers!
Interesting article full of superficial yet superfluous functional analogies. I think your notion of “sharing” is somewhat polarized around Twitter unbiased for your own personal inconvenience when it comes to sharing. Also I respect your sharing of your experience hence is not the same across all users.
Facebook into a degree conveys an intimate experience happening under private and authenticated social network , yet in the other side twitter implies a broadcasting mode with a very simple authentication with not significant value at stake.
The real question is which one offers a better “sharing value” across a social network graph and also there should be a huge consideration when evaluating functionalities as ambiguous like sharing when either Facebook and Twitter are not mutually exclusive.
Yet again like Jon Foreman above described and should remind everyone that these things are subjective.
The description of your experience around concepts like network latency was amusing, yet exclusive to your own, 2-3 and 1-15 seconds latency eternity is not shared across all the users without mentioning all the other details and complexities.
GOOD LUCK.
The fact that FB Connect can share things implicitly can turn off some people, me included. I would rather have fine control over what to share, and what not to share.
Inspired by the article, we just added a “tweet this” link to the ’success’ page on our app: http://whenisgood.net
A techy tip: sidestep the tweetmeme javascript to get more control over the suggested tweet. We create links dynamically like this: http://twitter....ested+text+here to build a more personalised message.
TechCrunch the jury is still out on Twitter’s long term success but YouTube’s ability to quickly connect and share videos is increasing in popularity as users are spending more time on YouTube.
Facebook faces the challenge of having too many applications that many of its users have no interest in participating but what is of interest is how will its Fan Pages application do long term.
What is your opinion on the subject?
PS. Your critics don’t understand the purpose of TechCrunch which I clearly understand. Therefore I thank you for your continuing excellent content in your niche market.
I think that despite Facebook not facilitating ‘resharing’ is not as crucial considering past information is available to see way into the future. Twitter streams consciousness and comments left an hour ago are rarely red.
Facebook pages attract browsing behaviour and so it is less important to have such a reshare feature.
Al
Coffee Marketing Consultancy
Sharing is everywhere now, via facebook, twitter, and many others. Though, how to personalize virtual world post a great challenge. Sharing and connecting with others will be giving users another direction on the social web: Personalization. http://www.perkpipe.com is focusing on offering web personalization on today’s social web.
What’s lacking is a co-relation of numbers. Aside from being passionate about social media, why not do what all other media requires to gauge its effectiveness: do the research and get accurate data.
Branding and PR campaigns have been around for decades which soft sell, create WOM and influence buying decisions. However, there are methodical and statistical ways to validate their effectiveness versus assuming they work.
Let someone do a representative and controlled statistical sampling of 5,000-10,000 Americans and ask them, “did Twitter or Facebook directly impact you seeing any of the following movies, A, B, C, etc? Was Twitter more important in influencing your decision to go versus A) Reviews by friends, etc B) Advertising C) Reviews by critics d) No, Twitter was the influencer e) etc.”
Just 2 cents to throw into the pond of discussion.
Note: my comment was meant for “Forget Ebert: How Twitter Makes or Breaks Movie Marketing Today” totally sorry – too many windows open.
http://adage.co...ticle_id=139444