Should Facebook Really Kill Twitter and Why Do We Want One Service To Always Kill Another?

Those endless Digg killers from a few years ago made me yawn instantly because no matter how many niche clones of Digg web developers from around the world bothered to launch, the huge crowd was securely settled on Digg and had no visible desire to move elsewhere – even if those other places were as good as the blogosphere made them sound and probably even better than Digg itself.

Every time a new service is launched, we always try to compare it to something that we already know so that our readers could easily understand what exactly we are talking about when we describe service X as “service Y with a twist”. Of course life is easier when you can compared X to Y and understand the meanings and the purposes of both of them. But why do we always expect one service to kill its prototype if it is better and the twist that it has is so much more useful? After all, do we really not need any competition in the online world?

Now let’s take this week’s talks about Facebook harming Twitter seriously after adding tagging functionality to Facebook updates (so that we could easily mention our Facebook friends right in our updates – same as we now do on Twitter using @replies). The bloggers were more than eager to wonder if it was really “Goodbye Twitter?” like yet another feature added to Facebook will inevitably mean the end of the huge service that Twitter has already become. And Facebook Lite going live definitely sounded like the final nail in Twitter’s coffin – no less.

Honestly, I really fail to understand why it always has to be a matter of choice for everyone? Why we don’t expect two services that have some similarities and serve the same purpose for some people to be unable to happily (or not that happily) co-exist? Exactly why am I supposed to quit Twitter only because Facebook has some of the features available on Twitter, especially if I use the two tools for very different purposes and in very different manners?

After all, all the cars that are sold in the world can take you from point A to point B and the differences will only be in the speeds and the levels of comfort offered by various models from different manufacturers. So are we now supposed to all vote for the best car manufacturer in the world and forbid all the other manufacturers their existence so that we all could drive the best cars only?

There is always enough space for competition and in many industries there’re enough consumers for everyone – and how good your product is will determine what market share you will win. And if competition exists in the real life, why can’t it exist in the (pretty strange) online world?

I have a feeling that even in the online world there is enough opportunities for competition and even if you do the same thing that your competitors do but happen to do it somewhat better than they already do, chances are you will still manage to attract a user base – provided that you know what marketing and promotion is.

True, the social media crowd tends to only choose one darling and only think about it all the time and promote it everywhere – quickly forgetting the previous beloved darling when we move on to the next one. But who thinks it is like it should be and do we really expect the mainstream users to only do what the social media gurus tell them to do (like stop using Twitter @replies and go tag people on Facebook from now on)? And is the worldwide online population really small enough not to provide enough users both to Facebook and Twitter?