Facebook's big blunder

Are you defined by your competition? It’s easy to fixiate on you competitors and end up defining your company or product on this competition. Sometimes this works out and defines a market of two symbiotic companies; Think Coke v. Pepsi; McDonalds v. Burger King. But sometimes this behavior kills. Think Facebook. Facebook famously altered their format to compete with Twitter by changing to a Twitter-like interface.. This Twitterization of Facebook created a Frankenstein’s monster of social networking. Taking the usable old Facebook and bolting on a twitter-like crawling “news” feed. Now Facebook serves neither its old users who don’t spend hours a day telling people what type of pizza their eating (let’s face it, more than two posts a day – and you have nothing going on), nor the new users who believe that everyone is interesting in their pizza selection. By playing their competitors game without maintaining the faithful, Facebook gets a big thumbs down.

So the question becomes, what’s a company to do when faced with a new niche competitor stealing their users? In Facebook’s case, I think the answer is to extend their offering rather than cannibalize what they have left. Give users choices to organize their friend information as they see fit. Twitter-like or facebook like. Maybe even allow selection by friend. So you can see the real-time play of the close friend, while periodically peruse the musings of the distant acquaintance. Do I care what score that guy I barely knew in high school received? Maybe Facebook became too enamored with Google like simplicity to offer choices; but then again maybe Microsoft is a better model for domination. The decision smelled of desperation (and don’t think that Twitter didn’t notice). By not being themselves, Facebook diluted their brand, and became a less good version of Twitter. Shame on you Facebook. Bad Business.