The year of Twitter and Facebook

Monday, 4 January 2010 | Filed under News

LOS ANGELES: Twitter, fuelled by smart phones and online bursts of 140 characters, soared to lofty heights over the past year while Facebook eclipsed MySpace to become the world’s leading social network.

“Those are the big winners,” said Jason Keath, a North Carolina-based social media consultant and founder of SocialFresh.com, an organizer of social media conferences.
“Facebook more or less tripled their size this year while Twitter grew immensely. I think Twitter had between two and four million users at the beginning of the year; now it’s 40 million.”

With 350 million members, “if Facebook was a country, it would be the fourth most populous nation,” said Scott Stanzel who runs Stanzel Communications, a Seattle-based PR consulting firm.

“Going back one year ago, I don’t think people would have thought Twitter would get this big.”

Twitter has reportedly spurned takeover bids worth hundreds of millions from Google and Facebook and its influence as a communications and newsbreaking tool has been validated in a number of ways over the past year.

In June, the US State Department asked Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance on the service because it was being used by protestors angered by the results of Iran’s disputed presidential election.

More recently, Google and Microsoft began integrating Twitter messages into their respective search engines, a new feature described as real-time search.
The popularity of smart phones has much to do with Twitter’s growth and young and old alike have happily embraced the hybrid between instant messenger and email.

Stanzel credited social media tools with “redefining the way in which companies or politicians relate to their consumers or constituents”.

“These companies and politicians who have taken to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube are building more of a permanent relationship with their consumers or constituents because they are able to engage them in conversation.”

Keath though predicts Twitter’s growth is “going to slow down”, saying it’s inconceivable that the San Francisco-based firm could match this year’s meteoric surge in user numbers. Twitter, he says, needs to be wary of spammers “putting out garbage, bad information, and trying to direct message everyone in the entire service to * links and things like that.”
“That would cause people to restrict their networks a little more.”

Keath suspects Twitter, which has yet to unveil a plan for making money, will seek over the next year to become more of a marketing tool.

As for Facebook, Keath believes it is likely to launch a payment portal. “There’s debate over whether there would be high adoption of giving Facebook your credit card information. If they do that, they’re not only going to have your social network but your commerce, too. And then they would have pretty much locked in most of your activity online.”

— The Star/AFP, December 2009