Twitter Wars vs. Facebook and Myspace

After rereading my thoughts on the recent cultural explosion known as twitter, I thought it would be prudent to look at real numbers on the subject of social networking competitions. Who's REALLY your social daddy?

I used google trends (you might remember we used to call it zeitgeist) to see how the toddler twitter is truly fairing against big brother facebook and ugly uncle myspace. And yes of course using google trends is fool proof, providing real, tried and true scientific results. If you don't believe me - Google it! If you don't believe in sarcasm...then you should look it up on wikipedia.



As you can see (actually you can't, really, so you'll need to click on the graph above to get a clear image), twitter barely ammounts to a blip on the screen when compared to facebook. Before you go getting your panties in a bunch and burry twitter remember that facebook is a giant multi-billion dollar institution which makes comparisons using it as the basis difficult for all but things like "Obama" or maybe "Limbaugh".

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, but Ryan, you just said Twitter is a cultural phenomenon, how can it only be a blip on the screen? While the search results for Twitter have only skyrocketed compared to themselves and remain a blip against facebook, the number of news stories about Twitter eclipsed that of facebook for a brief period of time during April 2009.

Why did this happen?

Freakin' Ashton Kutcher! Part of the draw of twitter for many is the fact that you can feel "at one" with the celebrity community. You can tweet "@aplusk wow its great what you are doing for world malaria day" and you can feel like you are friends with someone famous and, after all, thats all American society wants these days: to be a celebrity or a youtube sensation.

I guess the irony in this whole thing is that it was that very same obsession with celebrity that made twitter is what it is today. Twitter is the Paris Hilton of Social Networking: It is famous for being famous.

What's Paris doing these days anyway?

And feel free to follow me on twitter @rybupsp If you're interesting I'll even follow you back.

Tweet it

I have participated in social networking for about five years. It started with facebook. After that it didn't take long before I had a myspace page.

When I finished college, facebook was still a bit of an elitist network. Not everyone could join, you had to be part of an existing network such as a college or university that was affiliated with facebook. Eastern Michigan University didn't agree to be a facebook network until after I graduated, however, since I still had an emich.edu email account I was able to use that and join before many of my friends who had graduated before me.

Myspace at the time was the undisputed social network king at the time. Tens of millions of profiles! Once facebook opened its doors to high schools, the general public and then business and "things and places" it qrew much faster than myspace and has taken over as king particularly on the networking end. While myspace certainly provides more customization, facebook displays tons of information about many people in a way that is extremely easy to navigate.

Then here comes this twitter thing...again. I say again because twitter is not a new thing. I created a twitter account a year or so ago but it had been around a while before that. All twitter really is is a website that lets you send quick text updates to your subscribers. Now, facebook has something similar, It used to be called "status" but a couple months ago was strangely changed to "share". As strange as that move seemed, far be it from me to criticize changes to the facebook layout as they continue to increase the efficiency by which you can gain information about those you wish to learn about. While facebookers almost always complain against these changes with complaints about the "new stalkerbook" everyone...EVERYONE comes around in the end. Whatever it is that facebook calls it, it really has the same functionality of twitter but its only a small piece of what the book has to offer.

So, anyway...the reason for this post was to talk about how twitter has come back on the seen. The way I see it, it happened in the blink of an eye. I left for Africa in the middle of March, came back in mid April and all of the sudden CNN is in a tweet war with Ashton Kutcher and every radio show I listen to along with sports organizations and even Coach Rich Rodriguez are tweeting away.

I mentioned this at work today to a colleague and he commented on how amazing it was that a minor cultural phenomenon could appear, or reappear as it were, on the scene, during the course of a vacation.

Needless to say, I'm paying much more attention to my twitter account and tweets.

So we have facebook for the networkers, myspace for the high schoolers and twitter for the tmz/gossip loving Americano yuppies.

And then the old people and come and mess up everything.