Twitter's Social Graph vs Facebook's

Heilemann is talking with

Dustin Curtis ✖

Twitter's Social Graph vs Facebook's

I had a very strong feeling of anger after hearing about Twitter blocking the "find friends" feature in Instagram and Tumblr. But when I sat down to write about it, my opinion changed.

It's still kind of a dick move, but when you think about their options, it makes sense to me. Read more here: dcurt.is

Heilemann

You're forgetting the Like button. While people are more likely to follow people they're interested in on Twitter, on Facebook people are much, much more likely to Like things left and right.

This means that Facebook really has the best social graph. Not only is it often intimately interlinked through tagged photos, family relationships, work and education background etc, but you're also tagging things you Like as you go along in a fire-and-forget manner; something Twitter doesn't have. In fact, Twitter has very few of those things.

Dustin Curtis

I should think about this more before writing, but here are my immediate thoughts:

I don't think people use the "like" button as an expression of true interest so much as an expression of "this is cool, and I want to tell the creator". This was my theory with the Kudos button on Svbtle.com blogs, and from what I can tell, it is proving to be correct.

On Twitter, clicking the "follow" button is a heavy task that involves a lot of baggage that you know up front -- following someone means you will get all of their updates, so you better be interested in what they have to say.

Facebook's graph is cluttered with a lot of things that are only tangentially related to your actual interests. Brands weren't even a part of FB until recently.

Heilemann

Liking is also a way to express to others what I like. So while I don't care what The Black Keys have to say in general, I love their music and I want the world to know, so I like them. After a few years, I have liked hundreds (at least) of things. Some are brands, some are fan pages (Firefly forever!) and some are specific articles on various sites.

On a sidenote, the Kudos button is slightly misleading (as I'm sure you know by now) because it is a) a mouse trap, not requiring an explicit action and thus easily accidentally activated and b) irretrievable. It's very easy to give a kudos which can't be ungiven, whereas you can for instance always unlike on Facebook (which I do).

Heilemann

Sorry, ran out of room.

But yes, the Facebook graph has a lot of seeming clutter. But I'd guess that the clutter is actually quite sortable. Did I hide this thing I liked from posting to my stream? Vote it down. Have I interacted with this thing I liked? Vote it up. Did this friend I interact with a lot also like this thing? We probably have it in common, vote it up. And so on.

The more data you have, the more data you have.

Dustin Curtis

I only have one counterpoint to your response, but it's a really big one: Facebook ads are terrible. Every report about them is negative. They have horrific click-through rates. On the other hand, I've heard that Twitter ads are extremely effective. What does that say about the respective graphs?

Regarding the kudos button being "misleading" -- it has been around long enough, I think, that the vast majority of kudos are now intentional.

Heilemann

Well, it's hard to say what it says about the graphs. It might just as well say something about the complexity of Facebook's site vs the simplicity of a tweet stream. Or it might say something about the BI team at Facebook vs the one at Twitter. Or the audience. It could be any number of things really.

Re. Kudos, that's a whole branch on its own. It's been around long enough, for people who come back. But for new people, it's still a 'what does this do... oh... ehm... I might not have wanted to do that' mouseover zone. Here's an example: