Social networks: Twitter versus Facebook

I’ve been thinking about Twitter as a social network a little the last few days. I don’t really see it as a coherent social network and certainly not something which could go toe to toe with Facebook, or could it?

I put these two primitive infographics together this evening representing my incomplete thoughts about how Twitter and Facebook could be modelled as social networks. Twitter seems to me to be a pretty distributed social network with status and the social graph as core components and the other stuff almost outsourced.

Facebook is a lot easier. It’s components are pretty much all within its ecosystem, including 3rd party apps.

I’m not sure how to represent how both Facebook and Twitter interface with 3rd party sites and platforms and create a sort of identity layer but the main distinction between the two seems to be consolidated versus distributed even though both have linkages into other sites and platforms which result in a sort of extended ecosystem.

I could have this wrong or could have over-simplified the models so feel free to pitch in. I’m trying to get my head around the models. Facebook makes sense to me as a social network. Twitter, on the other hand, doesn’t – at least not to the extent Facebook does. I have started seeing younger users who seem to have bypassed Facebook for the most part and went straight to Twitter but just don’t see how this makes sense if the plan is to use Twitter as a sort of end to end social network.

(And yes, I do need to get out more …)