Fundamentally, the problem with both is based in the flippancy of the Facebook “Friend” and Twitter “Follower.” These terms are more than just ambiguities; their meaninglessness is symbolic of why both social networks will fail and dwindle in the shadows of the next generation of social networks.
I’m not as popular as my Facebook profile would suggest. Sad but true, I really don’t have 1,000 friends. And neither does anybody else. My apparent popularity is rooted in the exaggerated culture of Facebook, where knowing a name, perhaps even recognizing a face, seems license for “friending.”
Of course, we could think twice and consider the implications before carelessly clicking away at friend acceptances. We could say no. We could tell our prospective friends “I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re great, but I think we should get to know each other a little more before I let you into my list of friends.”
Yet for reasons Mark Zuckerberg intended or not, there is a culture built into Facebook in which it is convention to be polite and accept a friend request — without any regard for who’s asking. This custom of near-universal friend acceptance has stripped all significance of the Facebook “friend” and the relationships that word was supposed to represent.
This shouldn’t be taken lightly or written off as irrelevant to a Facebook user’s online experience. When the online social network was first being hashed around as a potential internet utility, the basic premise was that it would mimic our worldly social interactions and provide an incomparable means for communication. The problem with a community based on friends who may or may not actually be real coupled with a massive communication platform is the establishment of a non-specific, unmoderated audience. When you are talking on Facebook, there are no ways — short of privacy controls rarely employed — to control whom you are talking to.
I believe that Facebook would be immeasurably improved if the infrastructure or the culture permitted communication targeted at specific audiences consciously forged not to conflate friends with non-friends. Facebook’s current inability to do this represents a fatal error, which I believe portends its ultimate overshadowing by the next evolution in online social networks.
If you think I am hinting at Twitter, you’re tweeting wrong. Though I recognize the brilliance of Twitter and how incredibly it functions as an online utility, fast, simple, effective communication is not enough to preserve its rising popularity and stature.
The recent Twitter boom — which The Daily Princetonian presented as some avant-garde social networking tool when in fact it has been around for some time — can be accounted for by some combination of factors. First, microblogging is definitely a compelling idea, suitable for the modern web user, who skims and almost decidedly doesn’t read.
But the most attractive feature of Twitter is that it represents, to borrow a cliched term (I swear I do it reluctantly), a state of nature for social networking. As an experiment, I tried to replicate Twitter’s social network infancy within Facebook by creating a new profile and producing a friend list with fewer than 50 friends. By purging my social network, I was able to communicate with a group of friends I could rightly call my own.
By similar logic, because Twitter is less popular than Facebook, access to my personal tweets is better contained; it’s only for my friends. The current Twittering follower is closer to a real-life friend than the Facebook “friend” is. And because of Twitter’s relative social accuracy, it offers a far more useful social resource than Facebook.
But Twitter’s utility, which is inextricably tied to its social accuracy, will decrease as more and more people hop on the Twitter train. The ever burgeoning Twitterati will create an unsustainable, inaccurate culture in much the same way as its rotting-monument rival, Facebook.
The success of the current species of social networks will be their undoing. A niche thus arises for the next social network, a Facebook Killer that can provide a better organization to sustain the benefits of social network infancy.
Capable of meeting the challenge of enduring its own growth, the Facebook Killer will curtail the chasm of the 1,000-friend culture, redefining online friendships and the means of facilitating them.
One day, there might just be no one left for Mark Zuckerberg to poke.
Peter Zakin is a freshman from New York, NY. He can be reached at pzakin@princeton.edu.
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