Dear Facebook: You're Not Twitter. Please Stop Trying To Be.
I think Mark Zuckerberg has an obsession – and it’s not Asian women, stealing ideas or koala meat. No, what the Facebook founder clearly covets is Twitter. Sure, Facebook is wildly successful, the most ubiquitous destination site on the Web, and has made Zuck rich beyond his wildest dreams. But, let’s be honest here, the poor guy obviously pines after his 140-character counterpart.
Why else would Facebook spend the past year doing everything in its power to become Twitter? From last year’s major redesign, which introduced the streaming news feed, to today’s new privacy controls which allow users to openly and publicly share information, Facebook has been moving more and more toward a platform where its information (your information) is basically public .
Problem is, Facebook users don’t want that – at least a good portion of them. Facebook is not Twitter. It’s not a platform for sharing everything with the world. It’s a platform for sharing things with friends – with great security walls built in. This is why Facebook was able to ultimately distinguish and separate itself from MySpace, and why Facebook has been able to establish trust with its users. We all feel comfortable knowing that we can share photos of that hilarious Friday night out with our friends – even if we have 350 of them – because of the built-in network protections and privacy settings. With the introduction of the new open settings – which will open people’s information up to everyone on Facebook, ala MySpace – that sense of privacy is going to quickly disappear.
Twitter is great at what it does, and I’m perfectly happy using it to share bite-sized pieces of information with the world. Facebook is also great at what it does, letting me share bigger pieces of information with people I know and trust (plus a few random old co-workers and people from high school, but whatever). The two, however, are very different services that serve completely different purposes.
Of course, this all comes down to money. A more public Facebook is a more search engine-indexed Facebook that sells more (and better targeted) search ads, based on conversations between you and friends that you thought were private.
Twitter envy is a powerful thing. Ev and Biz are everywhere, and Zuck … well, he’s sooo 2007. He hasn’t been on the cover of BusinessWeek in months, and I hear Sarah Lacy won’t even return his phone calls. But, it’s fine, Mark. To paraphrase Minnesota’s newly-crowned junior Senator, Facebook is good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you. They also like Facebook how it is. So leave it alone. Thanks.