Twitter vs. Facebook

We all know Twitter and Facebook both are very famous and popular social website.

For Twitter, it is more public. People publish their thoughts and rarely prohibit being followed. They know their tweets will be viewed by whole world. Actually, I think that’s the reason why Twitter hasn’t its own photo or video host service. It doesn’t care about privacy. So you can or have to conveniently upload personal media on 3rd party host service and quote them on your tweets. No access control, no view permission. You publish it.

For Facebook, although there are many organizations and famous persons totally open their posts on Facebook, most rest are not. In their mind, Facebook is a smaller place where is a little bit private. It’s neat, like in a lounge. Few people expect their Facebook status update being viewed by the world. They just like share something with friends, family and maybe workmates.

Now both Twitter and Facebook are like to enter other’s territory. However, I don’t think they will succeed. People won’t look Facebook as a publish platform, or Twitter as a personal share-house. It’s just like Google try to be social and make people stay at Google sites as long as at Facebook. That’s impossible.

One common shortage of Twitter & Facebook is: you can’t control who is looking your post. Neither Facebook nor Twitter can let you control which friend/follower can look your update/tweet. Yes, there is a general switch, but you can’t set it on post level, like we set permission on a file in MS-Windows.

Base on that, I believe there still is opportunity for new player in social media stage.

Just imagine there is a Facebook-copycat where you can set your friends/flowers into different groups. When you publish a post, set it’s visible for only college mates. And their comments/replies are also limited in this group.

At least, this site will be suit for me.