With the three recent big stories in Facebookland (the FriendFeed aquisition, real-time search, and now the test launch of Facebook Lite) it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Facebook is going hard after Twitter. (Update 1/16/2010: Facebook just rolled out “via” as their version of Twitter’s “retweet”. That, combined with recent changes to their privacy policy to make the platform more open, are two more clear examples of Facebook’s “Become Twitter” strategy)

What is more difficult to understand is why they are doing it.  Maybe it’s a personal vendetta because of the failed acquisition talks?  I just don’t see the business reason for this.  Here’s why I think Facebook should forget about Twitter and focus on making its own platform great:

Different target markets

It is well known that Twitter skews heavily towards younger tech-savvy users, with the rest of the population finding it hard to see the point.  Facebook, on the other hand, is increasingly being used by an older demographic.  The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55.

Why is all this important?  Because regardless of what Facebook wants to be, the demographic that is settling in on the site for the long haul is different from the Twitter user base — and they have totally different needs and behaviors. At this point, Facebook is too established as a brand to be able to force their product onto the target market they want.  And why would they even want to?  They have access to a much larger user base than Twitter.  Which brings me to my next point…

Always compete on your strengths

The mistake that Facebook is making is that it is trying to be Twitter for a user base that does not want Twitter.  Not convinced?  Go to http://www.brandtags.net and look at the brand clouds of word associations that people make with Facebook and Twitter.  For Facebook, you get words like Communication, People, Stalking.  For Twitter, you get words like Pointless, Stupid, Useless.

Now, of course Twitter is none of those things, but it shows the enormous gap in brand perceptions.  Why would you want to move a powerful people connection platform closer to something with a niche market that a majority of people find useless? There are a bunch of other Twitter statistics coming out lately that prove the Twitter niche factor: 5% of users account for 75% of the activity, 60% of US Twitter users abandon the site after a month, and 24% of all tweets are from bots (ok, that last one is irrelevant to this discussion, but still interesting).  And there’s also this interesting conversation on Mashable that clearly shows the differences between Twitter and Facebook usage.

The bottom line is that Twitter is for information sharing, Facebook is for life sharing.  That is what people are using it for — sharing photos, videos, those annoying pokes and quizzes, keeping in touch with friends all over the globe, lurking on profiles of people you used to know way back when.  That is the strength of Facebook, and that is what they should focus their platform on.

So what should Facebook do?

So here is my advice to Facebook: go where your users are.  Understand how they use the site, what their needs and behaviors are.  Go visit them, talk to them, watch them navigate around, understand why they are there in the first place.  And then enhance your platform to fulfill those needs.  Build new ways to feel closer to the people in your life.  Make it easier to share and discuss media.  Build families-only mini-communities.  Who knows what you can come up with if you just understand your users and build a web site for their needs?

Seriously — let Twitter be Twitter, forget about them and don’t force your users into that kind of experience.  Don’t try to be “status updates for everyone.”  Be a platform that lives up to the value proposition on your home page: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”

I have recently noticed an interesting trend among the people I follow on Twitter. It appears that my network is dividing itself neatly into 2 camps: those who care deeply about the content they publish, and those who use it more casually. Let me explain…

Saying “good night” to everyone you know

Twitter users who casually update their status without thinking about it too much continuously say things like “Yep,” “Good night tweeple,” and “Banging my head against the desk.” Cryptic information that can be quite difficult to figure out. I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just clear that some people view Twitter as a broadcast medium mainly meant for people they know in the real world, and that’s fine (I tend to think that’s what Facebook is for, but let’s not split hairs about this).

I’m also not suggesting that all tweets should be serious — the odd random or exasperated update can be interesting, enlightening, and often very funny, and it also shows that there’s a real person at the other end. I do follow a lot of these casual users, but I know all of them personally so their updates are meaningful to me. And of course there is always the option to stop following someone, so you only have yourself to blame for the content you receive on Twitter.

But then there are those who care a lot about what they say…

Sharing content via Twitter

People who care see Twitter not just as an outlet for random thoughts, but also a valuable tool to learn and share and expand their knowledge about issues they care about. I follow a bunch of people who clearly care about the content they put on Twitter, and it adds enormous value to my work life and personal life (people like @jontyfisher, @adamnash, @SmithInAfrica, and @TheONECampain, just to name a small and diverse subset of folks).

Sharing interesting information on Twitter makes you a good citizen of the web for a very important reason. It allows the best content to rise to the top. What makes content sharing on Twitter powerful is that humans are involved, not just technology. The difference between going through your RSS feeds and learning about something through your Twitter network is that on Twitter, someone read the content and decided that it is good enough to share. And if you follow people with similar interests, chances are you will find it interesting too. As Justin Basini (@justinbasini) put it in a recent post: “Twitter users aggregate, edit, filter and share better than any technology.”

But what if the content isn’t interesting to anyone else? Well, then it will just die in the constant stream of tweets that go by every day. If the content is good, it will be retweeted, and spread rapidly not just through your own network but the networks of others.

In sociology the phenomenon of information spreading through multiple networks is known as The strength of weak ties. In a 1973 paper, Mark Granovetter developed his theory of weak ties. The theory states that because a person with strong ties in a network more or less knows what the other people in the network know (e.g. in close friendships or within your closely-guarded Facebook network), the effective spread of information relies on the weak ties between people in separate networks.

And this is of course one of the main strengths of Twitter — that not all connections have to be mutual (when you follow someone they don’t have to follow you back, like on Facebook). In other words, retweeting allows information to jump from one tightly-knit network to the next, allowing for the rapid spread of valuable information throughout the entire network, not just your own.

A new way to value information on the web

There are still a lot of people who feel that Twitter is a waste of time and adds no value. That might be true for them, but I think we are seeing a very interesting phenomenon here, and that is a new way to value information on the web and separate what’s worthy of reading from what’s not.

RSS feeds allow us to see content we might be interested in (but not every article will be good). Digg and similar services allow us to see what other people find interesting. But only Twitter puts those features together and lets us see content that people with similar interests than ours find valuable. And there is real power in that.

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter if you’d like.