In a recent survey for a client, when asked to describe what people used social networks for, the most-used terms were revealing.
MySpace: Promote
It's ironic that Yahoo! recently shut down Geocities with this term coming to the fore of MySpace users. Can MySpace even be considered a social network anymore? For many artists, musicians, and small businesses, MySpace has becme the new Geocities: making the promise of high traffic and easy-to-create websites.
In testing, it seems clear that in MySpace, friend counts have become meaningless, because none of the people in the liast (or very few) can even be described as friends. They're all trying to take a fresh piece of real estate to bring people back to their own presence. The categories have lost their meaning, and everyone is spending time worrying about themselves.
Facebook: Friends
The most-used term to describe who's on the friend list, people look at Facebook as the place to connect with friends in real life, and that is it. They use applications like living social to share their personalities, upload photos to keep people apprised on what they're doing, and update their status: commenting away in threads to show commonalities in interests.
Facebook, partially because of the strange user experience design choices, is a study in contrast where it comes to how people are actually using it. On one hand, Facebook presents many opportunities to find new friends who have someone in common with you, that you may not know. Take for instance the email alerts when someone else comments on a status update that you have also commented on. That action shows the user that not only do they have someone in common, but that they've taken the extra step of making their affinity for that person public in the stream. Yet, there is very little in the way of new friend requests as a result. This reinforces the concept that if you don't know someone in real life, you're not likely to friend them in Facebook.
That being said, Facebook generates lots of traffic to external sites when friends link to them in the activity stream. In some cases, referrals from Facebook rival that of Google. On the surface, one could say this occurs because a recommendation from a friend is extremely persuasive, which is true. But I would also suggest that for the largely older-skewing demographics of Facebook who still cling to the perception of anonymity in Internet usage, it's because they feel free from having to directly associate themselves too strongly to a person while exploring their interests via these links. Site linking is the asymmetrical aspect of the Facebook experience.
Twitter: People
In the survey, Twitter responses were centered around finding people with common interests: there is no expectation set in terms of professional or personal connections. From what we've seen in practice, it follows. What was interesting is the willingness to follow active ccounts regardless of whether they are clearly people, clearly feeds, or somewhere in between: as long as there was some common interest.
What has been most interesting in watching use is that people who are very heavy Facebook commenters would seem natural for Twitter, but stay within the friendly confines of Facebook. There's some kind of barrier that keeps people from making the transition. My only explanation so far is that Twitter works best when used with applications that sit apart from the singular Website experience: this may be too much experimentation over too long a period of time for Facebook users to endure.
What do you think? Please contribute to the conversation by commenting below, talking on Twitter @mleis or joining the conversation at Facebook.com/michaelleis.
Funny, still pretty spot on after two years ;p