January 2010

Facebook becomes more like Twitter

It’s clear that Facebook has size and growth that easily diminishes that of Twitter.  However Facebook has been watching twitter steal quite a bit of the media limelight for it’s instantaneous distribution of news!

Facebook’s improvements on Twitter innovations have been many including:

• changing of  Facebook privacy settings and terms of service to encourage much wider distribution of status updates, photos and more.   Better than Twitter which by default makes all posts public; distribution can be customized for each Facebook status update (from a closed – friends only to a broadcast news visible to all)
• recent changes status updates to include links to user profiles when including the name of a friend is akin to @messages in Twitter;
• NEW share links capability in Facebook is much like Twitter’s retweet feature, only much better.

How Facebook Share is better than Twitter Retweet

Twitter’s Retweet

A few months back Twitter added the retweet function to repost original users comment and/or link without the opportunity to editorialize or put your own personal spin on the link or status update.  The Twitter Retweet functions much like the game of telephone where users cannot editorialize.

The tweet appears to come from the original twitter user (1) including featuring the avatar and name with a credit for the Retweet (2) given as a footnote.

There is little incentive to retweeting another’s post and in fact twitter followers can easily be confused by seeing the avatar and name of a twitter user in their stream that they are not following.

Sharing in Facebook – Better than a Retweet

The new Share link in Facebook only appears on status updates that feature URLS (not photo links or text only status updates).

Since the link is what matters; users insert their own commentary on the link.
Once posted the shared item references the original poster of the link in the smaller footnote of the new shared post.
To many, this way of giving credit to the original link is much preferred over Twitter’s parroting (if it’s not a word it should be) of the link.

Sharing options include posting to your Facebook profile or sending the link in a message.  Note the via credit to the original post below the new comment:

What do you think? Is Facebook Share better than Twitter Retweet?

Other Copycat Innovators

Be sure to check out how Foursquare is changing the world.  Indeed small innovative companies like Foursquare are giving larger businesses like Yelp great innovation ideas.

Yelp has taken on the best aspects of Foursquare and Facebook’s iPhone app to establish itself as the premiere social networking business review app.  Be sure to read about Yelp’s iPhone app at Mashable.  The Yelp app, with over a million iPhone users and apps for all mobile devices might be very well positioned to create significant space between itself and smaller Foursquare and Gowalla location check-in games and less well known business review site Google.com/maps.  It will be really interesting to see how Google Maps responds to Yelp’s innovative updated iPhone app.

Tourism Innovation

Sometimes being original pays off.  Sometimes it’s best to see what others are doing well and improving on their ideas to enhance your tourism experiences, clean up your Web presence or improve the way you connect with your ideal guest.  I think we could all spend more time looking at the Web sites of others who are innovating and succeeding.

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