that's so last month. or the problem of obsolete sns's.

last week my friends and i got in to a debate about the "eminent" demise of facebook. they insisted that the sudden emergence and success of twitter was proof that people no longer considered facebook as the source for internet communication and recent (failed) redesigns of facebook were the death throes of the once all powerful site. i disagreed. for several reasons.

to begin with, i don't believe facebook and twitter are meant to do the same things. i would even go so far as to say that twitter is a "social networking site" in the strictest sense of the word. i say this knowing full well that i am not the model user/appreciator of twitter, but i do listen to those that love the site and what sticks out most to me is how unidirectional the messages of twitter seem to be. transactions on twitter seem to clearly fall into two categories, input and output, with little overlap. some people use twitter to glean bits of news from sources important to them (input) but, at the heart, twitter is geared toward the individual who wants to broadcast status messages to an audience (output). sure, followers can reply, but conversation is limited to 140 character snippets and a scrolling home page where new posts replace the oldest. in this way, it's hard for me to think of twitter as a community building site (community implies the exchange of significant content. and, yes, that was a value judgement.) and, as the "networking" part of social networking implies some sort of exchange, i really wonder how this is achieved under such time/space constraints. and, you know, telling 200 followers you had cream of wheat for breakfast hardly seems like a way to build or maintain relationships.

facebook is a horse of a different color. with a number of functions (contact information, messages on the public wall and the private inbox, picture albums, etc.) i don't understand how it is perceived as being in direct competition with twitter. if anything, twitter is simply one element, the status message, extracted from the entirety of the facebook world. now, i should disclose the fact that i think both sites are superfluous. facebook is just as guilty of encouraging the me-centered approach to 2.0 (i tag myself in a friend's picture, i list movies/tv/books that demonstrate my pop cultural savvy, etc. etc. ad nauseum) and i am just as guilty as the next in participating. that said, it fulfills my definition of social networking in that users exchange information. and, successful or not, the redesigns are always crafted with that input-output exchange in mind (you can digg a comment now, see new photos as soon as they are posted, read friends' status messages on your home page the moment they are posted...).

so will twitter kill facebook? not exactly. i think it's important to note how the twitter is keeping facebook on its toes, but i don't take it as a real threat. and while we may be too lazy to read an entire article in the paper (140 character summaries, please!), i don't think were willing to live by status messages alone. twitter's numbers may be rapidly increasing, but facebook has the edge in that this generation (see pew study) love uploading content (pictures, videos, audio...).

but i suppose the golden rule here is that nothing lasts forever. does any body even remember friendster? have all those myspace users run to facebook and never looked back? twitter may have its moment and facebook's popularity may lag (though numbers say membership is still growing) but one day the only places you'll find both sites will be on the wayback machine.