Facebook vs. Twitter

Social networking is to overcome the Internet, and the two leaders in this growing market, Facebook and Twitter. Every site has built community of millions of users and developers in a few years, and they fight with each other to become the top destination for web users want to share information with friends and colleagues.

Facebook was launched in February 2004, drew 135.4 million unique visitors to its website in April 2010 for a whopping 3.2 billion total visits, according to Compete, an analysis firm. Twitter was launched in March 2006, attracted 21.5 million unique visitors in April 2010 to 147,400,000 total visits.

Facebook is clearly the most popular social networking site, and it trails only Google, the Internet site with the most visitors. If you do not count the YouTube video sharing service as a social network, so Twitter is firmly in second place, far ahead of another rival LinkedIn, a business networking site, there were almost 13 million months of visitors in April 2010.

While Facebook has a huge lead by the numbers, a growing user backlash on personal preferences could threaten the area's dominance.

Facebook has tried to deal with Twitter's rise in various ways. Aside from trying to buy Twitter autumn of 2008, Facebook added @ labeling in September 2009 and created a "Lite" version that looked like Twitter, but Facebook closed "Lite" service down in April 2010 after less than one year.

Most significantly, Facebook rolled out new privacy settings that make more use of public content, and therefore more like Twitter, where the content is public by default. But this strategy backfired on Facebook, where users complain that privacy controls are too complicated to understand and actually make it harder to hide personal information from non-friends. Facebook responded in May 2010 with a new set of privacy controls, but it is still unclear whether this will satisfy the guard users.

Twitter has not had to deal with the same type of privacy backlash because the company has always made it clear that the tweets are meant to be public. Users have the option to "authenticate" supporters, which prevents most of the public to see their tweets, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Twitter has its own problems. Downtime is frustrated users on many occasions, although this was less prevalent in 2010. Twitter can also be an effective vehicle for spreading viruses, especially with the shortened links that hide the original source.

In fact plagued many types of security threats both Facebook and Twitter, including stolen, worm attacks, phishing, spam and botnets, as IT managers to be vigilant in order to increase employee use of Web sites.

Despite these security and privacy risks, Facebook and Twitter is undoubtedly rising. These rival sites attracts attention from competitors, as seen in Google's unveiling of buzz that brings Facebook and Twitter-like status updates to Gmail.

Many Internet users to log on both Facebook and Twitter because of the sites' various strengths, and because they want to separate a group of leaders from the others. But Facebook and Twitter leaders know that many people simply do not have the time or patience for more than a social networking site, and the battle for market share will only grow more contentious as the economic performance will be higher.