can twitter and facebook coexist?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of twitter, especially given facebook’s rapid growth. How will the two coexist? Are people’s communication needs / desires so great that they will adopt both or (like Myspace) is it a zero-sum game (meaning you adopt one and ditch the other)? If that’s the case then facebook will crush twitter as they have 50 times the users. But I’m not sure it is.
If you look at the following graph from compete.com it shows what they call “velocity”, which really means month over month growth in attention (sort of like time spent) each site is getting. twitter and facebook are both seeing positive growth (with twitter being the highest), while Myspace is negative (hinting toward the zero sum hypothesis stated above). Granted, we will never know what twitter’s growth would be without facebook (and vice versa), but this at least suggests they can both grow at the same time.
I’m not exactly sure where this will all lead, but I do have a few theories:
- twitter is too simple for widespread adoption. It doesn’t allow for as much personal expression as other social media sites like facebook (i.e. photos, comments, video, etc.) and therefore will not be adopted by mainstream users.
- twitter will be a companion to facebook for heavier users (near term) and trickle out slowly to lighter social media users. The people most likely to care about (and desire) the simplicity of twitter in the near term are the heavy users of social media.
- twitter will be acquired by facebook and become their mobile strategy and a replacement for “status updates”.
- facebook will move more and more toward the all-encompassing social network, which leaves a nice niche for twitter in the simple social networking space.
Any other thoughts? Can the two coexist?
Bonus link: I just read this article from the Alley Insider on twitter’s fate.
