Twitter Succeeding Where Facebook Failed

As Twitter grows beyond its 140-character limitation and prepares for an IPO, we could be witnessing the rise of a platform that succeeds where Facebook has failed

Remember the Facebook platform? Its debut was May 2007, and it was a big deal at the time. “Right now, social networks are closed platforms, and today, we’re going to end that,” proclaimed Mark Zuckerberg at the platform’s unveiling. Facebook allowed external developers to build applications on top of the data it had acquired about its users. (Facebook calls this data “the social graph,” which has led many other startups to talk about how they owned “the XX graph” for their vertical.)

The euphoria was palpable as companies like Zynga and BuddyMedia took the opportunity to acquire millions of new users at relatively low cost. Then Facebook started restricting what developers could do and slowly the platform became less attractive to developers, with mobile replacing Facebook as the hot new thing.

According to figures from Social Bakers, about 33 per cent of countries on Facebook saw a decline in monthly active users over the last six months, compared to about 11 per cent over the last year. Global Web Index reported earlier this year that Twitter was now the fastests growing network, experiencing a 40% user growth rate in the last half of 2012 while Facebook was only experiencing a 35% one. And with many in the media talking about how the Facebook platform is in decline with developers (eg. Forbes, Wall Street Journal, AdAge, PandoDaily, etc…), a new opportunity has arisen and Twitter has quietly assembled all the pieces.

Quietly Moving To A Platform

First came the ability to embed tweets in other websites, an innocuous move that seemed to present no threat to a large platform like Facebook. Then came the follow button on other sites, roughly equivalent to Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button. Next came the ability to use Twitter’s authentication framework, which provided login and user management services to developers who wanted to leverage it.

Of course, behind all this, Twitter has always been relatively generous in offering ways to get access to their data and augment it. Companies like DataSift have built strong businesses providing developers with access to all tweets coupled with extra social and sentiment data. Entrepreneurs built and sold startups around the idea of providing independent software clients to manage one’s interaction with Twitter on mobile devices, connected TVs, and beyond. All of sudden, Twitter was everywhere.

On June 29, 2012, Twitter showed how it would build a better version of the Facebook platform. It did not come through a massive announcement on stage in front of a lot of press but in a rather terse 439-word blog post by Michael Sippey, VP of product at Twitter. The post, entitled “Delivering a consistent Twitter experience,” highlighted the company’s ambitions for integrating with apps.

Sippey’s post set the Internet buzzing, mostly about the requirement that Twitter developers “should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” The chatterati missed the fact that the significant portion of the post discussed Twitter cards, with Sippey declaring “we want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets.”

Showing one’s cards

So what are Twitter cards? At their core, Twitter cards are a way to display extra information that goes beyond the 140-character limit Twitter imposes. For example, here’s what a Twitter card for last week’s entry looks like:

A tweet can include extra content such as images, video, GIFs, location and author info. Twitter offers different types of cards for apps, video/audio, photos, products, and more.

By allowing for extra information but not extra presentation, Twitter gets to control the user experience within the context of a card. This is important because it gives Twitter a great amount of control over how the content is being displayed. It also allows them to present it in different ways on different platforms. A developer can push out Twitter cards to Twitter and not worry about how they will be presented on the web, mobile, or TV. Twitter will take care of that formatting. Because cards allow for bite-sized content to be augmented, they fit neatly into the Twitter service, which has prided itself on artificial limits as to how much data it would carry.

The info card metaphor is also in use by Google in its relatively new Google Now service, a digital assistant that presents contact, calendar and reminder information as needed on Android devices (see picture on right). Expect the cards to appear soon in Google’s desktop and mobile search as well, as the cards provides just the right amount of information around a piece of content. As more digital devices appear with smaller screens (eg. Google Glass, smartwatches), the ability to deliver small chunks of content becomes a substantial design issue. Look, for example, at how Google is embedding cards into Google Glass, its wearable computing interface. Twitter and Google are at the forefront of changes that will stay with us for a very long time.

Just as the redesign of iOS7 has “flattened” the design template to focus on the content rather than on the interface, cards represent the logical next step, with most of the interface disappearing and the focus being put mostly on the content.