Twitter’s Butter, Facebook’s Bread
Can Facebook clone Twitter after failing to do so a dozen times?
In what is otherwise an overview of the current state of would-be Twitter competitors/replacements, Kalley Huang doesn’t bury the lede:
Last month, employees at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, joined a virtual brainstorming session to discuss how to build the next Twitter.
Among the ideas Meta’s workers talked over was a more extensive rollout of a feature called Instagram Notes, where people can share short messages on the photo-sharing site with their followers and friends, according to posts of the conversation that were viewed by The New York Times. Others said Meta should build a text-focused app using Instagram’s technology or add another feed to Instagram. They floated names for the features such as Realtime, Real Reels and Instant.
“Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” one Meta employee wrote in a post. “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.”
This is hardly surprising, I’ve actually been shocked Facebook hasn’t moved quicker to try to capitalize here. They’re a brand synonymous with social media, and the brand with perhaps the second-most mindshare (if not exactly usage) in the space is in varying states of chaos. Facebook can do this, they have the technology.
Still, Facebook has also tried to do this — clone Twitter — for well over a decade at this point. There was even a time when the core News Feed was made to be more Twitter-like, as the ever-present state of paranoia within that company led them to worry that Twitter would take over the world. Twitter did not, of course. And now it finds itself owned by one person. The wealthiest person in the world. And Facebook must have ultimately been happy their attempts to copy Twitter didn’t succeed.
Still, still — if you’re Facebook, why not try again? This is a unique situation and opportunity, to say the least. One reason not to try would be that you’re actually no longer Facebook, you’re Meta.¹ But still, your — yes, bread and butter — are in social media. And your core product there, Facebook itself, while still used by 2 billion+ people, is varying degrees of mistrusted, loathed, hated, and scoffed at. So why not roll out a new, separate app focused just on what Twitter does? Undoubtedly with superior tech! Maybe give people the option to choose a new @ handle when they sign up — with their Facebook account as verification, to reduce spam.² Get that social mojo back!
So many users are looking for something new, to the point where Mastodon, which has a sign up flow that may as well be written in hieroglyphics, has been gaining millions of users.
But sweet Jesus Christ DO NOT PUT THIS SERVICE INSIDE OF INSTAGRAM. I mean, seriously, what the fuck? It would be like stuffing a stuffed pig inside of a stuffed turkey. Instagram has become the comical definition of bloat before these floated ideas. They need to make it far more streamlined and simple. Not shove yet another thing in there.
I know that it’s where the users are. And creating new standalone apps typically hasn’t worked — even for Instagram. And I recognize that Instagram’s destiny is to decay the same way Facebook has been — get billions of users and milk them dry with ads while shoving in more and more ways to monetize until the app is unusable and it requires a menu bar that looks like Microsoft Office. And a privacy settings page that changes every time you load it and looks like an Excel spreadsheet.
Anyway. Sure, create a Twitter clone, Facebook. Go for it. I’ll even give it a try! Just don’t further ruin Instagram by shoving it down our collective throats there. Like some weird bread and butter eating competition.
For real reel.
¹ Facebook has been trying to leave aside the affiliation with social media in the pivot-to-metaverse from the name of the company on down.
² In my experience, there is still so much spam on Facebook as well. I would guesstimate that 95% of the friend requests I’ve received over the past many years (once my actual friends and acquaintances stopped sending them) have been spam, or spammy in nature.
