I think this comparison shows a fundamental difference between Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is really trying to find a use-case and serve a purpose that in some way adds to the productivity of this planet. Whereas Facebook's goal seems to suck as much of people's time as possible by having them do menial activities, while turning a profit. While the two companies may be in the same "industry" -- they certainly have very different missions (I think), whether they realize it or not.
Both are fads. Give it another year and we'll be onto another FB app and another social network website that lets you only send 80 characters at a time (it fits into a nice *nix console window!)
Facebook, and I say this with great admiration, is the devil.
First they use your friends to suck you into joining the site. Then they amuse all of your bored friends with games, then they use the games to get those same friends to lure in more FaceBook users and to market/sell things to people already there.
It's referral marketing taken to the nth degree. It's been obvious to me for some time now that it has more legs than Twitter, now it looks like it has more volume (and a better business model) as well.
The "its" in "its major rival" is facebook not farmville. They are saying that even some non-central and fully disposable part of facebook has more users than twitter.
This reminds me of Microsoft saying they will 'grow another Google' over the next few years (a few years ago). At the time Microsofts market cap was c.$250bn and Google's was $100bn. Now the Microsoft market cap is $264bn and Google is $186bn.
Bing might actually be heading towards a major slice of the search engine market.
Right now everyone's browser defaults to Google search. Partly this is because most people still have Win XP and when they got those the default (Windows live search) was horrible. There was a reason to switch to Google.
These days Bing's results are good enough that most normal people wouldn't bother to change their browser default if it was set to Bing.
Thanks to the good publicity it's been getting in the main stream media it looks like a _lot_ of people are going to upgrade to Win 7, including the crowd of late-adopters that stuck with XP.
All of these people will get Bing by default with their new install/computer, and a lot of them won't bother to change it.
A box you type in to get search results when you open the Internet window? Yep, I can 'google' from here. It would take a bad experience to drive these users to change their home page to Google again.
Also, even if you do realise you can change which search engine backs the search box in the top right, and manage to get to the add provider gallery, Google is way down on the second page.
A drop in search volume doesn't impact their content network ads, you are correct.
However I don't think Microsoft will let Google buy space on Bing to place their ads. Therefore a drop in search volume leads to a cut in ad revenue.
Even if placement on Bing for ad words was possible Google would have to give Microsoft a cut - right now they keep 100% of search revenue (minus operating costs). Unless Bing is substantially cheaper to run than Google that would work out badly for revenue per ad.
Worst of all from their perspective a drop in search volume would lead to a loss of opportunity to push news, gmail, youtube and especially maps/local search. These related properties must be benefiting heavily from their top placement in Google search results.
So, an OK replacement that comes with the monopolist OS installation and use that to beat the market leader. It worked with Internet Explorer.
No reason to worry, then?
I mean, it is not like Microsoft would do something immoral like e.g. cripple the state of art for years, to protect some other business area, right? :-(
Comparing FarmVille and Twitter is like trying to compare blunt hammer to a swiss army knife. A hammer is fun for doing simple, satisfying things like banging in nails and smash old glass window pains. Twitter, on the other hand, is like networking on acid - it's incredible & there's so much more you can do with it.
