Which is Better - Facebook or Twitter?

300 million users collectively spend more than 8 billion minutes on Facebook, every day. 8 billion minutes is a difficult figure to take in. That’s roughly 15,220 years. If you took 75 years to be the average human lifespan, that is 200 entire lifetimes. Lifetimes expended updating status messages, tagging photos, tending virtual farms and sending the occasional bitchy message round the back channel. According to Alexa, the authority on such matters, Facebook is currently the second most popular site on the entire internet, shifting gears behind Google. Its end of year revenue for 2008 was estimated at around $300 million and it employs nearly 1000 people to oil the giant e-cogs.

Step in, young pretender. Twitter is the current darling of the tech world, occupying the same position Facebook did two or three years ago (around a decade in tech-years). Measuring anything about Twitter is an exercise in futility due to its explosive growth, but it has been rumoured that their goal is to have 1 billion users by 2013. That’s one out of every eight people on the planet, on Twitter, in the next three years.

Numbers such as these are unprecedented. MySpace, the instigator of the social networking revolution, has been left in the dust by these savvy upstarts, and it’s now looking very much like a two horse race for the top of the hill. The question is, which service is better?

When Twitter hit its tipping point in the tech community, around two years ago, it was described first as ‘Facebook status messages and nothing else’, then ‘SMS for the internet’. Both slogans are telling. One complaint many users of Facebook have is its inherent bulk. Among other things, if you want to look like you’re in the loop you have to maintain your Status, Profile, Profile Picture, Photos, Messages, Pokes, Updates, Wall posts, News Feeds and Notes, and that’s before you get started on the tens of thousands of third party applications available to add to your Profile. With Twitter, everything was stripped away. Suddenly, you were your status message, and nothing more. The Tweet you had posted not two minutes previously was usurped, replaced entirely by the new Tweet you had posted not one minute after. It was streamlined, it was quick and it tapped into a notion of ‘social networking’ that made Facebook seem slow in comparison. Finding out everything a particular person is saying on Twitter is as simple as clicking their icon. No countless pages to flick through, no messy third-party applications, just a nice, quick, clean page with the bare essentials.

This is great, for a while, until you realise Twitter is subject to as much bumpf and pointless prattling as any Facebook status message or profile. Social networking is designed for only three things:

1. Networking and promotion: what better way to promote yourself, latest work, product or service than to become friends with your potential investors/customers?

2. Keeping track: find out what all your friends and family are doing, anytime.

3. Wasting time: got that homework to finish? That project to complete? Why not just check your Facebook or Twitter feed first? It will take next to no time, until you realise so-and-so said this about that and there’s a link to a webpage about it and then the webpage has a link to the Top 10 Worst Blancmanges in History and, well, that’s worth a peek, isn’t it?

Looking back over those three points, it becomes understandable why 200 lifetimes go missing on Facebook every day.

Indeed, the streamlined service of Twitter results in these three aspects of social networking being condensed into 140 characters at a time, until some people get so confused about Tweeting that they end up writing something nonsensical. With Facebook, the problem is turned on its head. There’s plenty of room to spread the padding around, countless pages on your Profile that can be constantly expanded and added to. Producing content is not the headache it is on Twitter. It’s consuming the content that becomes difficult on Facebook.

Therein lies the rub. Facebook is fantastic for producing content. Twitter is equally as brilliant for consuming content. Consuming content on Facebook is an absolute nightmare, which is why it takes 200 lifetimes a day for everyone to plough through their various pages. Producing content on Twitter is easy, but not if you want your content to be noticed. Tweeting is not simply writing ‘Had toast this morning.’ A tweet needs to have a point otherwise it will be lost in the constant barrage of the public timeline and you might as well not write anything at all.

Clearly both services have their requisite strengths and weaknesses, and both are looking to address them. Facebook is focussing on search, making it easier to find and filter content. Twitter’s API has allowed third-party developers to create URL shortening services, picture and video posting services to allow users to fit more content into a Tweet. Even more interestingly, Twitter is attempting to move its brand away from the ‘social networking’ sphere, now preferring to refer to itself as ‘information networking’. This is a smart move. Information implies usefulness, and the more brand focus placed on useful information on Twitter, the less bumpf there is likely to be. Facebook has a massive headstart on a company still struggling to make a profit, but its own problem is making this massive stockpile of information easily accessible and findable.

There’s a reason Google is the biggest internet presence. Search is everything. With the constant exponential proliferation of information on the internet, whether it be search engines, news portals, image hosting, social networking or information networking, an online company lives or dies on its ability to present users with the information they want as quickly and as easily as possible. Facebook and Twitter have taken the first step with their ‘Friends’ and ‘Following’ mechanisms, and real-time search is another boon, but more work is yet to be done. At the moment, Facebook still has the lead in mind share by a massive margin, and as an overall service it is more reliable, is more ubiquitous and easier to understand as a concept. However, in a world where available time and time-wasting are becoming ever more equivalent, the appeal of flicking through the sum knowledge of all your friends, family and colleagues on a single integrated Twitter page strikes many as massively appealing. At the risk of ducking the punch, it might be better not to ask the question ‘Which is better?’ but instead to ask ‘Which are you better at?’