When Facebook looked a twit

Lee, J. (2009). When Facebook looked a twit, The Straits Times. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from http://www.straitstimes.com/Review/Others/STIStory_359134.html

SOMETIMES, taking on your rivals by incorporating their strategies into your business model is just asking for trouble - as Facebook has learnt the hard way.

Over the past fortnight, many of the social networking site's 175 million users have been venting their frustrations online about the 'improvements' that Facebook has put in place.

And unfortunately for the website, the very essence of what made it popular - its ability to let groups of like-minded netizens get their messages across via viral propagation - came back to bite it in the posterior.

What Facebook tried to emulate was the model made famous by its very serious competitor for Internet users' short attention spans. It tried to be Twitter.

Twitter, which the world woke up to during the Mumbai terror attacks late last year, is basically a mass-SMS-texting device. The users get to write short messages and blast them to their friends and followers.

US President Barack Obama successfully used Twitter, for example, to reach out to the younger demographic during his election campaign. These days, you can follow Twitter updates from senators who tweet from congressional sessions to Britney Spears and her manager on what she's up to in the recording studio.

Obviously, given Twitter's highly successful viral reach, Facebook must have thought to incorporate that into its own modus operandi.

What Facebook appeared not to have foreseen is that its value proposition is very different from that of Twitter. Both might have been 'killer apps' in their own ways, but while Facebook became the quintessential social networking website, Twitter is more of a blogging tool - it's the lazy man's way of blogging.

Facebook started out on the same premise as other social networking sites such as MySpace, Friendster and Multiply. But because it began on a collegiate- based community, where only owners of e-mail addresses of American universities could register for use, it managed to achieve a higher level of popularity with more discerning Internet users when it eventually opened up its user-account policy to anyone with a verifiable e-mail address.

Very quickly, MySpace, Friendster and their kind quickly lost their street cred to Facebook.
On Facebook, a user can connect with friends, contact via e-mail or interact with one another through various applications or games. What was most compelling about the model was that you can visit your friend's profile page to check what he or she has been up to or take note of their status update like: 'Joanne is feeling sorry for Timothy Geithner.'

Most usefully, it had a page called a news feed where it aggregated your friends' doings.
The other fun element was the fan pages of people from Mr Obama to CNN's star anchor Anderson Cooper and companies like the American Ballet Theatre.

So what did Facebook do? In its latest design, it started pushing the updates onto the News Feed page, the way Twitter blasts users' messages out.

Suddenly, users' Facebook news feeds were inundated with the latest updates from their fan pages. And the news feeds started publishing all quiz and game results of the users' friends, which caused a furore among those who didn't want to be spammed.

In fact, that is the very point that irritates Twitter users: That the lazy man's way of blogging tends to spam their 'inboxes'.

Another sign of Facebook stealing the Twitter model was the change in its status update. Previously, this was just an empty field at the top of your profile page to fill. Like the aforementioned: 'Joanne is feeling sorry for Timothy Geithner.'

Now, the field says: 'What are you thinking?' prompting users to basically tweet longer messages like they do on Twitter.

The backlash from Facebookers was so vehement that product director Christopher Cox had to issue a statement: 'We've heard feedback that there is a lot of application content appearing in the stream. We will be giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream.'

There's a lesson to be learnt in this failed 'improvement' experiment. And that is that on the Internet, habits tend to stick and any change infuriates netizens. Also, because netizens are so vocal, especially with negative comments, website operators must tread carefully when incorporating newer, seemingly successful technologies into their models.

As someone who oversees a website myself, I feel so sorry for the Facebook team. Talk about giving no face. But that, unfortunately, is the Internet: It's their way, or the super highway!