Ted Avery

Recently Facebook made a few significant changes to their homepage design which you can read about on their blog. But what a lot of tech enthusiasts are really complaining about the new design is how much it imitates social “micro-blogging” website Twitter — and that’s saying a lot, as the techies are usually the first to embrace these layout changes. Prominence is now given to people’s status updates in a profile’s mini-feed, ignoring chronological order and pushing other story types below. The tweaks that were once available for displaying certain stories on your home page are now gone, focusing on your friend’s status updates whether you like it or not.

Many see this as Facebook’s attempt to battle the rapid growth of Twitter. It’s well known that Facebook failed in trying to acquire Twitter before, so it obviously sees status updates as very important. But are they really?

Here’s what I think. In my experience, Twitter and Facebook users are usually mutually exclusive (give or take an occasional visit). Chances are when you read this, you weren’t even familiar with Twitter (nerds like me aside). They are different products for different needs. People that use Facebook love it for all the applications, like photos, wall posts, notes, messaging, and countless third-part apps. Many people on Twitter have left Facebook to escape the overload of applications, enjoying the minimalistic microblogging, streamlined interface.

Yet Facebook has tried to bring the minimalism of Twitter to Facebook, which really makes no sense. Nobody ever said “Hey, I want all the applications and great features of Facebook, but lets hide them all away and pretend we only have one feature like Twitter.” What a waste of such a feature-rich web platform! Ultimately the implementation has

THE BOTTOM LINE: Twitter is more about what it isn’t than what it is. Feature-wise, Facebook has nothing to compete with. Mobile notifications and status updates have been in place on Facebook for a long time. This redesign is competing with Twitter in the only way it can: by altering the focus of Facebook to status updates for every user. This in turn is sacrificing user preference and bringing a product that isn’t really Twitter, nor is it focusing on being the feature rich web platform that Facebook should be.

And to finish, here is a hilarious video that pretty much sums up my thoughts about Twitter. As you can probably tell, my preference lies with Facebook. (If you are reading this from Facebook, click here to watch it)