Facebook Is Copying Twitter and They Need to Stop
Posted by admin on March 15th, 2009Facebook has made many changes and improvements in the past few years, mostly on the functionality and visual side. For the most part, the overall experience of using Facebook has indeed improved, by creating new and unique ways to interact with people and easily see information of friends. These changes usually come as a surprise, because Facebook just updates the code and the new or modified features instantly become available for the user. Today I opened up my account to reveal a different kind of surprise, one that contains an extreme amount of familiarity.
Click To Enlarge
If you are a Twitter user, then you will immediately see what familiarity I am talking about from the above picture. The new “public wall” on Facebook now looks exactly, and I mean EXACTLY, the same as someone’s Twitter page. Sure, there is another sidebar on the left, but the top of the page has the status entry field, like Twitter, and underneath it is your friend’s statuses, like Twitter. Their small picture is also displayed the the left of their status, with “reply” and “like” buttons, just like the “reply” and “favorite” buttons that Twitter have used for o’so long. Twitter has had this layout for every year of its life, and Facebook has just stolen it.
There have been some recent analyst reports that Facebook is worried about Twitter, and this is definitely proof, in a clone-copy cheap rip-off kind of way. Facebook: you have been pretty unique and quite funcitonal for as long as I can remember, please keep it that way. In order to retain loyal users you must be different. If you continue to look and feel like Twitter, will I or millions of other people have any reason to come back to Facebook? Absolutely not.
[Tags]Facebook, Twitter, Social Network, Web 2.0, Politics, Copycat[/Tags]
Tags: Copycat, Facebook, Politics, Social Network, Twitter, Web 2.0
How do I change it back, it works for twitter, not failbook.
Grow up. Twitter has a daily reach of less than 0.3% of internet users and Facebook has well over 16% daily reach. While to the techno-elite, it may seem that Facebook is terrified that twitter is overtaking them but Facebook is not concerned in the least, they simply are picking up a system that works.
Imitation is a standard it every industry. Look at the new slate of web browsers. Things like Opera’s speed dial now appear default in Chrome and Safari Beta 4. Opera’s private browsing will now appear in Firefox 3.1 (now 3.5), Chrome, Safari (it has for a while now), and IE 8. Safari Beta 4 moved tabs to the top just like Chrome. Hell, Safari even reuses some of the same exact icons in their UI as Chrome. Did these companies steal from each other? Sort of. Do we all reap the rewards? Of course. There are far too many examples to list but I think you understand the premise.
Development of a new style and idea and then mass acceptance is what forwards industry. You, as a would-be start up entrepreneur, should realize this.
Lesson: Being different does not net users, but quite the opposite. People flock to what they know. If anything, twitter should be happy as their under-represented system has hit mainstream. New users will understand the system better and twitter should be able to RETAIN more users, their biggest problem.
Sorry for the long comment.
Regards
@Satie Paz
What are you talking about? Copying something exactly decreases reputation and even if it works, if it is just copied and nothing dramatically is improved then in the long run they may lose some users. It is only okay to copy in moderation and learn from others.
If everyone copied eachother on the internet then there would be no innovation and each and every site would look the same. From the obvious look of it, that isn’t the case, and everyone fights for their own exclusive image and functionality.
In the immortal words of “Me”…. BFD! Who the cares? They are totally different services. Am I supposed to complain because cars from Honda and Toyota both have 4 wheels? or that Firefox and IE both have a help, file, and view menu?
Both sites were lists of comments before. Not much different now. Sure there are some format changes on Facebook but that’s hardly a reason to make a fuss.
By the way.. I have read lots and lots of other blog sites that have adds and tags on the sides and comments at the end of your posts and contain a menu system of some kind at the top. Who did you copy??