If You Can’t Buy Them, Become Them

Ben Wilkins / Sep 11th / Comments

There is a strong push to incorporate social media into healthcare. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at some of the healthcare social media tweet chats, like #hcsm or #hcmktg.

So it’s important to understand how exactly Facebook trying to kill Twitter.

The Facebook vs. Twitter Battle

First it tried to buy Twitter for half a billion dollars in October of 2008. To me, that seems like a pretty good deal for Twitter, a company without much of a business model to begin with. But, the Twitter brain trust said no.

So Facebook decided that it could kill Twitter by doing the exact same thing. Yesterday, only about two minutes after I posted on Twitter about this very topic, Facebook announced that it will be adding the ability to tag status updates with an @ symbol, just like Twitter. This, combined with Facebook Lite, may make some Twitter users wonder “Haven’t I seen this before?”

What’s Twitter’s Next Move?

Twitter has to respond. It has to continue to roll out new features or they will appear stagnant. If Twitter remains silent, the impression will be that what they currently offer is the best they can do.

The logical response to me would be to add some sort of organization to the tweets. Right now, tweets are organized by time in descending order. Currently, conversations get interrupted with other tweets and it makes it very difficult to follow thought processes. If Twitter can thread tweets or find another way to organize, it would be a huge step in its development.

Why Facebook’s Efforts Will Fail-Whale

It’s simple, really. The two sites have two completely different purposes. The people I follow on Twitter rarely overlap with my friends on Facebook, and for a good reason. On Facebook, I share more personal information, information that I only want people that I’ve actually met in person to see.

My Twitter followers, however, are people who share similar interests, whether I’ve met them or not. They may be fellow geeks that can provide some programming support, healthcare tycoons that have great insights and ideas, or fellow fanatics of Kentucky Wildcats basketball. I’m not giving out my email address, home address, pictures of my vacation, or other personal information to these people.

At the end of the day, this is a very good move for Facebook, and Facebook users should be very excited about it. This move has potential to be the first steps of change for Facebook. If Facebook makes it easier for non-Facebook members to read updates while still protecting private information, Twitter should worry.

With Facebook’s new platform and API, a few tweaks and external applications could provide healthcare organizations and health systems with social networks that provide Twitter-like public updates while protecting private information. Combining the functionality of the two services could open up several more doors that are currently closed.

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