03 Apr 09 Facebook shouldn’t copy Twitter

Tags: facebook, twitter

At first, I quite liked the redesign of Facebook. It put the status updates in your face. It was the the part of Facebook that I liked the most. It looks like Twitter now. It’s good coz I like Twitter.

But…

Facebook shouldn’t try and copy the Twitter way of doing things, because Facebook has too many other features going for it. Twitter is all about “status updates” (in the Facebook way of words), while Facebook is about status updates, walls, photos, groups, applications, etc.

In the past Facebook had the “news” feed which was ranked according to your “setttings” and popularity. It put the things on the front page that you might interesting while you were gone from Facebook. This is one of the features I would really like to have of Twitter.

I don’t have time to sit and stare at Twitter while the streams come in. So sometimes I miss interesting tweets and links. While I would like Twitter to have a feature where it shows the interesting and “popular” tweets since I was gone, there aren’t enough “interactions” and variables to give a great representation of what happened.

There are more interactions on Facebook and thus it can more effectively show you the “highlights”. The highlights tab on Facebook is their competitive advantage. They should think about perhaps emphasising the highlights tab again as it were when it was the News Feed.

What do you think?