Wibbly-wobbly socially-networky stuff
Paul Rissen wrote a short post on Twitter and Facebook’s respective successes today, on the back of a conversation on Twitter which began with a somewhat provocative tweet.
I think Paul is wrong on this. Actually, I lie. I think he’s not entirely right.
The aspects of their existence of which Paul speaks are certainly factors in their successes, but they’re not the reasons why they got where they are today. Now, it could be argued (and indeed I would argue) that the Web is important to their continued success, with it being more of a factor as time goes by.
Taking Twitter first of all: Twitter became successful because it was a simple and lightweight communications mechanism and little more. Sharing links was a direct follow-on from that (give anybody an Internet-based communications mechanism and links will be shared). Until relatively recently, in_reply_to_status_id didn’t exist, so links between tweets didn’t really occur. Old tweets, while persisting if you know their URLs, effectively disappear. Twitter became popular because it was accessible — initially SMS, then the web, then XMPP, and finally the API. Essentially, it was the combination of convergence, transience (there’s no feeling of ”taking up space” in tweeting), simplicity (say what you like, so long as it fits in a nearly text message-sized lump), and social interaction (follow your friends, your friends follow you, and it’s analogous to a conversation in a pub). The social aspect, in particular, means that the more of your friends who use it, the more useful it is for everybody — that’s why it’s very difficult for alternatives to compete. Everything else has simply followed on from these beginnings.
Facebook, on the other hand, features far less in the way of innovation. In the UK, at least, Facebook users used to be Bebo users who used to be MySpace users (who in some cases, used to be Orkut users). The only thing which Facebook actually had going for it in the beginning was that it was cleaner and less full of dross than its predecessor. As people were drawn to this, Facebook capitalised upon the growing numbers and aggressively rolled out more features in an attempt to keep any potential competitors at bay (most notably “apps”, and later Facebook Connect).
Crucially, both services specialise in transience. Both services started — and gained significant popularity — with a relatively basic feature-set. Twitter’s killer feature was that it was a conversational tool which worked across SMS and the Internet. Facebook’s killer feature was that it wasn’t as horrible as Bebo or MySpace. In neither case was proliferation of links (or sane URI design) a particularly significant concern. Twitter does have fairly sane URI design, but its front end was built in Ruby on Rails, which steers developers towards that end. Facebook’s URIs have actually had a significant overhaul in the last couple of years (but has actually made them worse: everything’s now stuffed in the fragment identifier).
In neither case was playing nicely with the web a crucial feature in gaining momentum or even critical mass except that as communications services which operate on the web, they’re going to be used by people who want to be able to send URLs to one another. Thus, although Paul is right to a point, it’s our use of the medium in general which enforces this, rather than any smart design; and, rather than being a significant factor in these services’ successes, it’s more the case that you can’t realistically survive on the web without it. Links aren’t a feature, they’re a critical constraint.
