The War of the Social Networking Giants3/18/2009 4:22:00 PM
The
Social Networking giants are at war. The big players
MySpace and
Facebook still rule the roost, in terms of influence and network traffic but a new player
Twitter has entered the scene, and though it has a long way to go to be a real contender is gaining followers fast.
Twitters power lies, perhaps, in the ease with which it’s interface can transmit potentially
valuable information instantaneously to tens of thousands of individuals, each of whom has the option to resend it, with minimal clicks, to further tens of thousands of fresh recipients. This feature enables news to spread like wildfire. For example yesterday news of South East Australia’s earthquake was common knowledge around the globe
via Twitter long before news agencies had a chance to get a handle on it.
The Twitter interface also enables continuous delivery of
real time messages which are displayed sequentially in no more than 140 characters, enabling those with quick minds, to sift through hundreds of thousands of messages, or Tweets, quickly and pull out only valuable information, which in more cases is further elaborated on, in a link page. The
search facility of Twitter is also invaluable.
So, who is winning the war at present? As far as figures go,
JR Raphael reports (1) that compared to
MySpace with, an annual 28% fall in US social network traffic to 52.21%,
Facebook increased its annual traffic by 149% to give it a 36.03% of the network traffic pie. Facebook is looking good at the moment since it “has about 150 million users, compared with the rapidly expanding Twitter's 6 million,” (7) but it is early days and
Sarah Lacy of, “Business Week,” suggests that, ”if anyone wants a shot at beating Facebook at its own game,
Twitter is the property to get you there.”
It seems that
Facebook, is keenly aware of the threat, for in a move aimed at out-foxing Twitter, it has been instrumental in the development of a new version of the Twitter application
TweetDeck. The updated version can receive both Tweets and Facebook updates all within a single interface and can cross-post between the two sites.
Nick O'Neill (5) explains that, like Twitter, “Facebook clearly wants to become a platform for
real-time communication and sharing among individuals and this new service will most definitely help further that goal. "
According to Sarah Lacey, (6) “Peter Thiel can try to damp enthusiasm for
Twitter by saying
Facebook is eyeing lots of acquisitions. But there's a reason Facebook was hungry enough for Twitter that it offered $500 million in stock and cash to a company with a small staff and no revenue—in the middle of a recession.” It will be recorded in the social networking history e-Books that Twitter declined the offer.