Different Strokes for Different Folks

By Mark Evans | Published: February 8, 2009

You look away for a second, and almost miss a weekend Techmeme bitch-a-thon; this one involving whether Facebook is going to kill Twitter, or Twitter is going to kill Facebook, or whether Friendfeed is going to kill both of them, or visa versa.

Confused? Don’t worry, it’s simply the blogosphere trying to fill some weekend hours when things are quiet.

The crux of the “discussion” is whether Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are arch-rivals or whether they’re simply co-existing. VentureBeat suggests the latter because all three services are enjoying strong growth, suggesting there is room for all of them.

Here’s my take:

1. Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed are different beasts. I use Facebook, for example, mostly as a general status update tool. At most, I’ll update it once a day, and share some news/blog posts. I take the same approach with LinkedIn, Plurk, Jaiku and MySpace – using Ping.fm to cover all my bases in one move.

On Twitter, I’ll update several times a day to talk about what’s happening, or exchange information and ideas with people. I’m not an avid Friendfeed user but I do like to share stuff on it.

2. With the Web 2.0/social media phenomena around for a few years, the landscape features established players. Sure, there’s no lack of competition but the number of viable players is quite small; consisting of Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace, Wordpress, Blogger, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us.

This is where most of the action is happening, which makes it difficult for new players to establish a foothold. Think of the invitations you receive to join new, cool looking services. Many of them are quickly deleted or only superficially checked out because it’s so difficult to migrate from an established service you have been using for years.

So, the argument about Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Friendfeed doesn’t matter much compared with the reality the playing field in social networking, blogging, video-sharing and microblogging appears to have been established with little room for new competitors. Now, that’s the more interesting discussion.

Here’s a chart showing unique visitors (U.S.) for Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter. Over the past year, Facebook has gained 14.9% more visitors; Twitter, 34.7%; and Friendfeed, 26.6%.