by Eric Rowell (cofounder of www.adollo.com)
With the announcement yesterday that Facebook will be adding a new “retweet” feature to stay ahead of Twitter, I thought that it would be a good time to look at where the companies stand today, and take a look at the futures of Facebook and Twitter. Will they ever join forces? Will they forever coexist? Or is this the beginning of an all-or-nothing battle, where only one of them will survive? Let’s take a look!
History of Facebook and Twitter
- February 2004 – Facebook launched
- August 2006 – Twitter launched
- September 2006 – Facbeook launches news feed
- November 2008 – Facebook tries to buy Twitter for $500 million in stocks. The deal doesn’t go through
- August 2009 – Twitter launches retweets
- January 2009 – Facebook announces launch of “retweet” feature
Facebook launched in 2004, and Twitter launched in 2006 (2 years later). Twitter had its own ideas about social networking, and was hoping that its platform could surpass the popularity of the current social networking sites at the time (Facebook and Myspace). From the time line above, you can see that Facebook immediately launches the news feed feature after Twitter is created. The “news feed” feature is basically a copy of Twitter’s platform, integrated with Facebook. Twitter probably didn’t see that coming.
This is about the time when Facebook begins to take the lead as the most popular social network, and when Myspace begins to decline in popularity. in 2006, we had three major social networking sites: the legacy social networking site Myspace, the micro-blogging social network Twitter, and Facebook which had the features of both. This is what allowed Facebook to pull in front.
Eager to acquire other smaller companies, Facebook tried to buyout Twitter for $500 million in November of 2009, but the deal didn’t go through. Almost a year later, Twitter launches the “retweet’ feature which basically allows users to pass messages around to other users. This brings us to yesterday, when Facebook announced that it will be introducing a “retweet” feature of its own very soon
Putting it together
So what does all this mean? Well, It’s clear that Facebook isn’t going to allow any other small social networking sites (like Twitter) to catch up. So what’s the best way to do this? Easy. Anytime someone else comes up with a good idea, copy it immediately and integrate it into your own site. That’s exactly what Facebook is doing. Sure, maybe it’s not very neighborly, but business is business. Take a look at Facebook’s and Twitter’s daily reach (courtesy of http://www.alexa.com)
At this stage in the game, if Twitter does anything new or innovative, Facebook is going to immediatly copy the idea and integrate it into their own website. Since Facebook is so much larger than Twitter, I think the only way that Twitter can survive in the future is if they do the same thing to Facebook, copy the ideas that work for Facebook, and integrate them. If they don’t, Facebook will continue to stomp them out until Twitter drops off the map just like Myspace did.
for more information, check out the following links:
http://mashable.com/2010/01/16/facebook-via/
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081124/when-twitter-met-facebook-the-acquisition-deal-that-fail-whaled/
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc2009031_743025.htm