Twitter is booming, stats say it clear. The growth in the last 12 months is indeed remarkable.
This made me think about the main differences between Twitter and Facebook.
Recents changes in the Facebook user interface suggest that their trying to get closer to Twitter, feeding live streams and allowing for more interaction (or conversation) with brands and celebrities, expanding the Facebook Pages section.
One main difference remains: asymmetric VS symmetric relationships.
On facebook in order to “keep in touch” with someone in need to have a two-way relationship called “friend request”. After all Facebook mission is to map our social graph and connect with friends and acquitances.
Things are different on Twitter. I can follow Steve Jobs, without having Steve Jobs following me. This simple difference (asymmetric relationships) can help understand the core differences of the two webistes.
Facebook is a social utility to map our personal relationships
Twitter is mapping our “attention”, allowing us to give attention and receive attention from other nodes of the network, whether these are friends or companies.
Twitter, in my opinion, is capturing the real essence of the attention economy, allowing us to connect (and disconnect, without feeling embarassed, like we would on facebook) to those entities that matters the most to us.
Facebook is obviously doing the same with their “fan system” on Facebook Pages, but the scale at which Twitter implemented it is much bigger and meaningful.