Twitter: Splitting the Social Networking Audience in Two

Most people have heard of the two main social networking giants: Myspace.com and Facebook.com. Both of these have similar features, in which they allow users to set up profiles containing their favorite movies, hobbies, etc. and communicate with other registered friends by chatting or posting on their walls. However, a new and rapidly growing website, called Twitter, throws all of that away.

Twitter, unlike the other sites, does not have profiles or walls. Instead, it builds off Facebook’s status feature, in which you can broadcast a simple sentence to your friends that tells your mood or what you’re doing right now. Twitter is all about snippets and conciseness; each status is restricted to 140 words or less. Others who subscribe to your statuses will be able to read all your statuses as they become updated and comment on each one, giving their feedback. It appeals to users who do not want all the extra features (and dangers) of Myspace and Facebook, and simply want to communicate with friends based on statuses. This has caused Twitter to become greatly popular and is currently the third most used social networking website in the world. It is especially popular with usage among mobile phones, as users can update their statuses anytime, anywhere, without the clutter of the extra features of Facebook and Myspace.

While many embrace Twitter as a revolutionary site, many others look down on Twitter as a "stripped-down" version of Facebook. It is indeed much less-featured than Facebook, disallowing any statuses longer than 140 characters and having no support for pictures. It becomes increasingly difficult to post long stories, as users often have to break up the story over several statuses, making the story hard to follow. Some may also say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but of course that is over the limit of 140 words on Twitter. Twitter also lacks the ability to place a message on a friend’s wall directly, making it difficult to start conversations with other people through Twitter. These lack of features make it seem pointless to many users, especially Facebook and Myspace users who are used to the plethora of features they receive from their websites.

But some people embrace that simplicity. When a person wishes to know the statuses of his friends, Twitter is the place to go. Facebook may give statuses, but they often become drowned out in often irrelevant information, such as pictures people upload or notes that people write about other things. This makes it harder for a person to check who may be going to a party or find out what their friends are up to at the moment.

Overall, it depends on the user’s purpose for using a social networking website. Some use it to express their feelings to an audience, in which Twitter is a great place to begin. Some, however, use it primarily to communicate with friends in wall posts or display pictures of them and their friends/family, in which they may find Facebook and Myspace a good place. Twitter has clearly caused a division in the social networking world, in which users now have a choice in what kind of social networking site they want.