Twitter Wants To Be Facebook

Written by Dave ParrackFebruary 11, 2016

Twitter desperately wants to be Facebook, how selfies kill more people than sharks, Microsoft fixes InPrivate Edge browsing, a collection of Windows 3.1 shareware, and how Star Wars: The Force Awakens should have ended.

Twitter Eyes Uncertain Future

Twitter is in trouble. It desperately wants to be Facebook, but just doesn’t have the number of users needed to be the next big social network. However, that’s not going to stop those in charge from trying to make Twitter look and feel more like Facebook, even against users’ wishes.

As promised, Twitter is rolling out its new algorithmic timeline. This places recent tweets Twitter considers to be more important to you at the top of your timeline, like an extended version of the existing While You Were Away feature. The algorithmic timeline is currently optional, and you’ll have to switch it on by selecting, “Show me the best Tweets first” under Settings.

Ironically, Twitter has launched this new feature at the same time as its latest financial report. This shows that Twitter is flat-lining in terms of growth, with the number of monthly active users actually dropping for the first time in its history. Twitter has 305 million users, which compares very unfavorably to Facebook’s 1.6 billion users.

It’s this disconnect between Twitter’s ambitions and the reality of its situation that those in charge need to address. Twitter is not Facebook, and never will be Facebook. It’s too niche, and lacks the broad appeal of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. However, a good percentage of those 305 million users love Twitter, so they are the people Twitter should be catering for. 

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, as the new algorithmic timeline is wholly designed to attract new users. In other words, Twitter needs to stop trying to be like Facebook and concentrate on being Twitter instead.

Source: www.makeuseof.com