Whether the belief is right or wrong doesn't matter. Perception is everything when it comes to new users.

I predict that within 3 years, Twitter will be just as big as Facebook currently is. Within 5 years, Twitter will be bigger that Facebook.

That said, Twitter and Facebook do different things, so it's unfair to compare them. Facebook is a multimedia platform and destination *like Yahoo in the old days*, Twitter is a multi-way conversation and application for on the ground interaction.

A better comparison for Twitter would be to Brightkite.

I have to agree with Brandon that they are very, very different tools. Not to mention, a Twitter feed installs to Facebook seamlessly, which makes them cohabitants as opposed to competitors. Look forward to seeing the full doc though.

All my best,
Rich

Text is a $100 bil business & twitter may have the most to offer in getting some split with high ROI ... OTOH facebook may suffer more from competition from those that do not host data - say friendfeed ... Yahoo is working with att.net, a separate example (relevance? Not clear on their arrangement)

It doesn't seem to matter who is "elite" only who is willing to pay ... People pay a lot for text ... IMHO Seems like a skewed way to interpret the upside for either business.

Twitter isn't trying to be Facebook.
And Facebook is, by all means, a giant phenom itself.

But Twitter will be far bigger. Why?

As I've been saying since it was twttr;

"Twitter. It's for EVERYBODY"

{Facebook, is not}

THEY AREN'T THE SAME DAMN THING! Email and IM do something very similar, yet do we see either of those technologies dying anytime soon? Of course not.

Twitter is a stand-alone tool and a complement to Facebook.

And hell yeah it's only for the tech elite. Too many idiots in the world as is.

As others have commented, Facebook and Twitter are complimentary and serve different needs. I don't think Twitter will ever catch up to Facebook.

Facebook excels at keeping people up to speed with their friends. It's a closed loop, and all of the information flow is predicated on established friend connections.

Twitter's strength is in the fact that you can follow anyone, whether they know it or not. Maybe it's a function of the people I friend/follow, but Facebook is more social while Twitter seems more informational. Everyone has a social life. Not everybody wants another source of information.

This is an apples and oranges comparison.

In any case, nice splashy title, but acquisition curves are just that, curved. You're pre-supposing linearity when linearity is almost never the case.

It is an otherwise interesting post. Thanks!

Another interesting 36 year arc is Atari. Then there was the case of a couple of crazed gametes that fused 36 years ago and I was the result.

Clearly, in 36 years I have not yet reached a level of cool to displace Atari logos on aging hipster tee shirts.

Such fail is all too common.

Let's hope Twitter gets cranking before it is too late.

Facebook and Twitter are two totally different things. Why is it in 08 we had plenty o pointless comparison posts, friendfeed vs twitter, pownce vs elvis, readwriteweb vs techcrunch, mahalao vs other startup dying trying hard to find a way to make money before consumers exit stage left and on and on.

Slow news day.

Facebook wants to become a platform for applications.
Twitter has become a platform for applications.

Facebook innovated on the social networking concept years after the first proper social networking site. Twitter is innovating on a whole new approach to communications, that even myself as an active twitter user, doesn't really know how it will pan out.

Twitter is doing to communications, what search did to information. Give it - and its competitors which haven't been created yet - some time.

but now, we can paint graphs in pretty orange and publish them and look all awesome.

and in other news, twitter will take a quadrajillion years to catch up with google.

With that said, I am on both sites and believe Twitter will make more money than Facebook when all is said.

Many people lead busy lives and they want to visit one site, see their friends' status updates and pictures and vampire bites and little green patches inside of 60 seconds. That is doable with Facebook's feed of status updates, but harder to track with Twitter, relying on external tools.

A better analogy might be to compare this Twitter trend with Friendster.

It could use a few enhancements but is a much better overall application than Facebook. Facebook will peak and people will move on within the next 5 years or so.

I'm a little turned off by the credibility of this piece based on the response of "Both are social networks that get discussed a lot these days - I think it's a fair comparison, even if they are different in important ways too." Just because they are both lumped into the social media bundle doesn't mean it's an apples to apples comparrison. Based on his response I would love to see his comparrison of Myspace Vs. Flickr, Ning Vs. Vimeo and several others that have very little in common except for being considered a social media tool.

Also, using the current per day growth to project out 36 years is a little silly. Their growth has hardly been a steady consistent line. We are working with multipliers here, steep inclines, not straight lines.

It would make more sense to compare their growth lines at similar ages of the sites.

1) Twitter is perfect for feeding updates into the other social media, especially facebook. As others have said, they compliment each other rather than compete.

2) Twitter has obvious and ongoing commercial uses - building followers and twitter specials, discounts, links that help your audience solve their problems.

3) Twitter is easy.

Even if Twitter flames out, someone will take up the mantle and build something similar. The market is now in place thanks to Twitter.

206,000,000 Mentions for Facebook
http://www.samepoint.com/?q=facebook

21,000,000 Mentions for Twitter
http://www.samepoint.com/?q=twitter

Ironically, we have had about equal success with both.

Thanks readwriteweb for shedding some light on this! Great post.

In addition the comparison is Apples to Oranges.

To provide some balance though, it's in HubSpot's self interest to post big numbers about Twitter usage, isn't it?

So I think there's more credibility to their core finding--that Twitter ISN'T 'all that'--than whether comparing Twitter to Facebook is a fair comparison.

It is. They are both social networking tools. The essence of the report is that MOST people don't find Twitter to be as useful a social networking tool as Facebook.

Period. End of story. Don't read any more into than it is. Just because you happen to be one of the few that 'get' Twitter, use it and find it useful, doesn't mean the rest of the world does.

Twitter is often flaunted as the next 'killer app'. I tend to agree with the report that it isn't--there just isn't enough value for the average person to take advantage of it.

Let's face it, it's really just a very slow moving IRC chat window. Some folks are addicted to it, some have better things to do with their time.

I'm not saying that Twitter isn't useful in some way--it is.

It's just not for everyone. For MOST people, Facebook represents a way to stay in touch with their friends and people they know offline.

The essence of Twitter is about creating NEW friends, or gleaning bits of wisdom/minutae from total strangers.

Imagine that--more people would prefer to connect with people they already know, than take the effort to connect with people they don't know.

Thanks for the info, Hubspot! I know have additional information on how to best use Twitter.

If you want to reach the 'elite' or 'influencers', use Twitter. When you want to connect with the masses--go to someplace like FB. (although I can, and do argue, that FB is a terrible advertising platform).

It's just information people, no need to defend Twitter so vigorously.

Signing up isn't a good measurement...how often do users use the product? Quite a few people I know sign up for Facebook and seldom use it. I never thought of Twitter as being for the techno "elite" and I am what one would call an average user and I LOVE Twitter. It's so much less complicated than Facebook. I find so much more info on Twitter -that's how I came across this article as a matter of fact. I don't know why the need to compare them, they both are useful in their way. The sandbox is big enough for all I say. The more toys the merrier!

For my own use, twitter is real time, facebook is old news and more of a diary of things that already happened

Facebook has shown that that's the direction it wants to take given its integration of the status and comment features and its failed attempt to actually buy Twitter recently. Going with Ari Herzog's comparison of Twitter to Friendster, most likely it will be that as a version 1.0 technology, Twitter has too many obstacles to face and as such it will never really mature and become mainstream.

I blogged recently about where I see Facebook going in the near future in relation to Twitter that also connects to this post nicely. The link is http://www.israelinnovation20.com/2008/12/05/having-failed-to-buy-twitter-what-will-facebook-do-next/.

With Flickr, Wikimedia, etc, I can search a photo for an armadillo. Facebook photos may have an armadillo, but I'll never know; and if I'm not friends with that person or wasn't tagged in the photo, I'll never see it.

Therefore, you can't measure Twitter's anticipated meeting point with Facebook as it's likely a growth curve --not a growth line.

Good points though.

I'm seeing reports (not confirmed) that twitter users is 3-6 million --a far cry from Facebook's 140mm (confirmed to me by Zuckerberg last week)

I'm tracking stats here

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/11/19/social-networks-site-usage-visitors-members-page-views-and-engagement-by-the-numbers-in-2008/

"Forget the numbers, comparing Twitter to Facebook is kinda like comparing a keg party to dinner with the in-laws."

(more at blog)

Twitter looks like it could be a great leap in communications but I still see it as being too tech-oriented for now - you still need to go and install apps or integrate it into your Facebook/etc account. Facebook statuses has shown that people are interested in this sort of system (i.e. micro-blogging) once it's integrated into their primary communications system - I'm waiting to see if Twitter can make the same leap. Facebook status are just built into the main Facebook page so you can't help but use it!

1. They assume linear growth.
2. They assume that no new services are going to come along and capture our limited attention spans.
3. They are based on numbers which are fudged from the source. (total accounts mentioned instead of active member counts).
4. They assume that only a few services can "survive".
5. They are based on U.S. markets only.

That's scientific.

I think Twitter can take off like crazy (and it has in many ways), but there IS a learning curve. It is hard to "get" at first. I had that issue as well. I signed on, thought WTF, and then left it idle for months. It took conversing with some people who did get it, like Tim O'Reilly and Chris Brogan, for me to have an "aha" moment, and now I use twitter more than Facebook, I have more people I follow and am followed by on twitter and I find it incredibly informative and engaging.

Here's a decent how-to for newbies:
http://tinyurl.com/26kej6

We're managing a PR campaign called "Operation Ballfinder" that is cross-social-media (i.e. YouTube, Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, proprietary sites, etc.). Twitter allows us to expand our reach to people who aren't our Facebook friends.

Looking at the 30+ demographic, the awarenesss of Twitter is high, but the use is low. But since our campaign drives people to monitor us on Twitter, we're seeing people have an "ah-hah" moment about Twitter even though they wouldn't have used Twitter before

I also find the interface clean unlike Facebook's clutterred one and irritating invites for applications. My gut feeling is that Twitter would come out tops.

Facebook is a social media platform. Twitter is a micro-blog ideally designed to attract an audience to other platforms, such as a blog or website.