The battle between Facebook and Twitter

Twitter has been a darling of the geek and media community - - and they are right now in a battle. There is little doubt that Facebook's latest change has been targeted at Twitter's market share. In this market, Twitter is a big underdog, because they really haven't hit the mainstream, while Facebook is a big mainstream player in the western world.

Let's take a look at how a star like Snoop Dogg use both these networks - since Snoop is currently an active on both networks.

The stats of Snoop

The stats are as following on these two networks:

• on Facebook he has 811,149 fans
• on Twitter he has 76,600 followers (where most of them are probably geeks)

In other words: His reach is over 10 times bigger on Facebook than on Twitter. Take almost any other company and their reach to their customers will be much higher on Facebook than on Twitter. This is a big problem for Twitter and they must improve these stats if they want to compete with Facebook.

The interface

Facebook supports following things:

• videos and pictures
• comments
• interactive interface
• people filtering options
• noise control

Twitter only supports text and the noise ratio is very high on Twitter (at least from my personal experience).

The looks

Twitter messages are only text and using weird syntax such as @amix. I don't think that appeals to the average person:

Facebook interface is amazing, especially for media (such as pictures and video):

I think looks do matter, especially since a lot of people love to look at photos and videos rather than plain text.

What Twitter has as a force?

Twitter has a much better realtime search engine. They also have an open API, which fuels a lot of different applications. The interesting thing will be if they can use these two in the battle.

My personal views

These are my personal views and not views of Plurk. If you wonder how Plurk stacks up with these two, well, I think Plurk is a much different product than both Twitter and Facebook and I am sure that Plurk's time to shine will come soon. Plurk is around 1 year old, Twitter is 3 and Facebook is 5 (to put things in a perspective).