Facebook announced today that they will be rolling out new search functionality in beta that allows people to find content (including status updates) that users have decided to share with “everyone”. This functionality is similar to the broadcast power of Twitter. (As a side topic its been interesting to see that Facebook have been positioned as the enemy by Michael and Eldon).
There is opportunity for Facebook here, Twitter currently is adored for the way it spreads news faster than anything on the planet, but there are risks too. Let’s not forget that they need to provide a user experience to match and cater for the inevitable flood of information that broadcast distribution will bring. For the main part, Twitter has left it up to the developer ecosystem, with the likes of Tweetdeck and Seesmic addressing this problem, but this might just be its Achilles heel.
*If* this turns out to be a race to real-time, then the winner will eventually be decided by a balance of user experience and developer opportunity. Twitter became successful because of its developer opportunities but so too have Facebook and they offer a far broader set of services to program against – not just a feed. This could prove key. Let’s not forget the 1st party experience of Facebook.com and Twitter.com where Facebook have arguably iterated faster than Twitter trying out new designs (for better of for worse) where Twitter seem to have focused their attention on support their exponential growth and trying to avoid downtime by building out their datacenter.
The balance, and this has been proven by the success of Microsoft (with boxed software), is to build out a platform that provides business opportunities for developers, support them in creating their own software, and in parallel incrementally improve the 1st party experience for people. The prime examples being Windows and Office.
It’s not rocket science but I do feel like Twitter has dropped the ball when it comes to their .com experience. It is hard to execute on though, we’re still getting it right (some would argue we are just starting) when it comes to 1st party experiences on Windows Live vs. the developer ecosystem. Nobody’s perfect but as in any business, it’s survival of the fittest.
Oh yeah, and Facebook, your A/B Testing is pretty cool.