Why Facebook Status can’t kill Twitter

Face­book has come out and openly said that their goal is to mir­ror our rela­tion­ships in real life not to nec­es­sar­ily con­nect peo­ple who didn’t know each other pre­vi­ously. Ear­lier today I read Nick O’Neill said that Face­book could kill Twit­ter by sim­ply enabling sta­tus pulls from the API.

While that would def­i­nitely cre­ate more com­pe­ti­tion there is a very core and cen­tral point where Facebook’s sys­tem can­not be Twit­ter with­out a very core change.

Face­book, as said above, is a 1-to-1 rela­tion­ship sys­tem. Every rela­tion­ship is mutual between peo­ple. Where as the power on Twit­ter is that it is 1-to-N. Tim Fer­riss, the author of the Four Hour Work Week has over 10,000 fol­low­ers and is in turn fol­low­ing ZERO peo­ple. If that was on face­book, he’d have to fol­low each of those peo­ple. Kevin Rose has over 80,000 fol­low­ers and fol­lows only a very small per­cent­age of those. Not pos­si­ble on Facebook.

Now Face­book would def­i­nitely con­quer a seg­ment of the mar­ket that revolve around just friend sta­tuses but so much of Twit­ter is fol­low­ing peo­ple who we can’t nor­mally keep in touch with that this mar­ket would have to remain with Twitter.

Could Face­book adjust and make their sys­tem com­pat­i­ble to the way Twit­ter uses? Sure. But not eas­ily. And def­i­nitely not as eas­ily as Nick made it sound.