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Facebook Opens Status API, Say Goodbye to Twitter (allfacebook.com)
40 points by jmorin007 on Feb 7, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments



Nick O'Neill has bid Twitter farewell at least once a month for the past two years. First when Facebook let you change status via phone. Then when Twitter and Facebook integrated via apps. Now it's because of an API. Twitter hasn't disappeared yet.


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allfacebooknews.com != alltwitternews.com

Uh-oh, that's not taken yet - domainpidgeon, where are you?


Facebook is mostly used for actual friends (well more than Twitter) and limited to real life relationships. That's true at least for the core demographic of college students. Twitter is much more about networking with new people.

So despite having similar or close to identical functionality technically, they have very different functions.


We've been through this before! I'll just quote myself from a month ago:

Facebook: full-fledged social network. Twitter: simple, quick-posting environment.

There IS a big difference between these two sites, Facebook won't kill twitter, we can all go to sleep calmly now :)

Edit: just for reference, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418151


Not only that, but more importantly, on Twitter you can follow pretty much whoever you like without a required acknowledgment from the followed person/organization. To be friends with someone in FB, both parties have to agree, which pretty much sets them apart niche-wise.


Twitter's asymmetric follow is one of the killer features. GitHub has it, as well...maybe if GitHub had a status API they could be a Twitter killer.


The other article said it would kill Twitter overnight. I'll check back in the morning.


Hey guys, I know I've said it before but honestly I think this has a serious chance of removing Twitter. I'll put my money where my mouth is ... I'm working on programming another version of Twitter using just the Facebook API ... we'll see if it makes sense :)


Eh, I see a lot of professional-networking promotion going on on Twitter, and FB has always been geared more towards personal connections, I think this may impact some of the userbase, but it's not a death knell. Given that it's trivial to sync your Twitter and Facebook statuses anyway, I don't see many users outright switching.


Well, I just tried to sign up for FB and failed in every attempt. I allow session cookies, and that's what their privacy policy says they only use. So they are excluding at least some of their potential market.


People claiming that technology X will kill technology Y should most certainly make an attempt at understanding what technology Y is first. This person clearly does not.


Just because X has Y's functionality now doesn't imply that X will overtake/kill/get people to say goodbye to Y


Now, is there a proxy service yet that let's you post your Twitter updates to Facebook and vice versa?


I did this for a couple days and turned it off. My Twitter feed is very noisy, and looks retarded to the 30% of my Facebook contacts who don't live their lives in front of LCD screens.


Not sure about the vice versa, but there's a twitter app for facebook. I pretty well stopped using facebook once I found it.


I have close to zero overlap between my Facebook status and Twitter updates. It's just two different social circles, if you will.


Me too, until I hooked up the twitter app to facebook. Then I stopped bothering with the facebook social circle, at least for status updates.


FriendFeed will kind of do that for you - of course another social network is probably not the answer you wanted !


Twitter app for Facebook does it both ways.


This doesn't even make sense. Twitter is a broadcast medium. Facebook isn't.


Wait, coming from Allfacebook? sure must be true...




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