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Thursday, March 5, 2015

Quick thoughts on $twtr vs $fb

(A recent write up on The Information got my juices flowing on this one.)

Facebook has proven itself quarter after quarter, and the numbers speak for themselves. They are able to leverage their scale and graph to print money. 

Good for them, but to dismiss Twitter as per metric based on user metric ignores a trend just getting started. 

On Feb 7th, I posted the momentum in twtr fundamentals. But a nascent trend I did not highlight is how Twitter is being used as the foundation for other apps. 

Twilo is one of the best examples. Meerkat is a very recent example. Dataminr is a more professional facing application.

Twilo is a consumer friendly (brilliant) UX leveraging Twitter data for relevant places to visit.

Meerkat is used to perform livevideo streams. Subsequently Twitter is in talks to purchase a similar offering but this only adds to twitter's real time information distribution capability. (But more design thought is needed for this type of app to be consumer friendly.)

Dataminr discovers actionable signals from Twitter. (Identifying legitimate tweets vs rumor inspired ones.)

Then there are the data collaborations: IBM, Google.

There is a lot going on with Twitter, outside of the more traditional momentum in their fundamentals, and these emerging applications will keep adding to twitter's value.

These new applications are things that simply don't work on facebook or any other non-rest-time network. 

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