Why This Twitter Advocate Is Eating Crow

The more time goes by, the more I love the Facebook feature which shows me things that happened on this day in the past. Sure, I’d used Timehop before but I’d always forget to open it up or to install it when I got a new phone.

I’m not one who spends much time thinking about yesterday so I absolutely love reliving the process of seeing people come into my life and how those relationships have evolved to become some of the most meaningful ones I have. Of seeing those tipping points where the superficial became full of depth. The opposite happens as well of course, but that’s the process of life and it has its own sort of beauty.

I don’t think much about it in regards to a feature that makes Facebook more ‘sticky’ and a barrier to exit, but as our timelines become more searchable now and these nuggets are uncovered over time it’s probably more important than we realize.

This type of feature is basically meaningless on a platform like Twitter, do I really care about what I did on Twitter 5 yrs ago? 3 days ago? Not really. The real-time nature that makes it powerful for certain types of communication also makes it easy to leave if the network effects are achieved somewhere else. It has become very difficult for me to stay bullish on Twitter as a platform, namely because I simply don’t see any strategies that can transform it beyond a certain point without losing the essence of what it is.

That said, Twitter is Facebook’s best friend. The worst thing that could happen to Facebook would be for Twitter to disappear. There is a virtuous cycle of content that takes place amongst Twitter users for discovery that then leads to posts of that content on Facebook and vice versa. Facebook is horrible at uncovering certain types of content compared to Twitter, but it’s a great place to put that content when you want something with a bit more permanence. And when you want something in real-time; an awards show, a sporting event, a piece of breaking news, etc, then Twitter is where you go for the information that you will then curate and push back to Facebook.

If you’d told me three years ago that I’d be writing this I’d have said you were crazy. We were in the midst of constant PR nightmares with Facebook constantly pushing the boundaries of privacy well beyond what its users were comfortable with. Remember how they could never regain our trust again? Well, here we are.

Twitter was the ‘purist’ platform that felt like it was on our side against big brother. But here we also are, with Twitter having made devastating moves that isolated and betrayed its developer community while at the same time not releasing any real innovation into the marketplace at all.

Meanwhile, Facebook Groups, Messenger, etc. have taken on some of the intimacy that its users craved and carved into Twitters core audience and finally releasing mobile apps that actually worked. More importantly, they’ve slowly become the defacto single-sign-on helper for mobile where managing usernames and password entry is such a pain for users.

The key here is that Facebook hasn’t simply focused on “how do we make a better Facebook”, they’ve focused on “what problems do users have, and how can we remove the friction from that process USING Facebook”. This is the key piece of strategy Twitter seems to be missing. Simply looking at ways to leverage your users (e.g. broadcasting to followers a Periscope session) will never make you indispensable.

Can Facebook overcome trust issues to take on the stage that always comes next (payments platform/commerce)? Can they overcome pissing off marketers on a regular basis by changing the rules of the game midstream? I don’t know. But I’ve certainly learned my lesson regarding whether they can overcome difficult barriers, and I’m eating my share of crow every day when I log onto Facebook *first* and may or may not open Twitter at all.

I feel like a traitor. But then again, I don’t feel like anyone has worked very hard to keep me coming back to Twitter either. I hop onto Twitter so that I can laugh at Chris Sacca’s latest joke, or to find insight and/or debate Marc Andreesen . I definitely find my intellectual fodder on Twitter from some of the minds I respect the most. Where else am I going to do that? Certainly not on Facebook. But that’s not a Twitter feature, that’s a feature of users who have leveraged the elements of Twitter that make it great for their needs. They could replicate that anywhere they choose.

And frankly, Chris Sacca (Twitter investor) should not be the person convincing me that they’ll turn it around. Where is the ‘voice’ of Twitter, and how is that voice reaching me in a way that I’ll pay attention to? Trust me, no one is reading those generic emails.

Look, I love Twitter, its usefulness to me is simply being slowly eroded away by other places like Facebook. And I’m really, really struggling to see a path forward that changes that.

Happy to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings — @techguerilla (See, a Twitter handle, something that Twitter is good for)