Twitter And Facebook Dominate In 2009

Twitter and Facebook have overpowered MySpace in the battle for the world’s most popular social network.

“Those are the big winners,” said Jason Keath, media consultant and creator of SocialFresh.com, to AFP. “Facebook more or less tripled their size this year. Twitter grew immensely. I think they were somewhere around maybe two to four million users at the beginning of the year. Now they’re near 40 million.”

With over 350 million users, “if Facebook was a country it would be the fourth most populous nation,” said Scott Stanzel, former press secretary to George W. Bush. “Going back one year ago I don’t think people would have thought Twitter would have had the influence it’s had.”

Twitter has allegedly refused takeover deals worth millions of dollars from Google and Facebook and its power as a communications tool has been authenticated in the last year. In June, the State Department asked Twitter to postpone maintenance because it was the choice of communication for protestors infuriated by Iran’s controversial presidential election.

The rise of the smartphone has also helped Twitter, says Jack Levin, co-founder of ImageShack.

“The explosion of smartphones in the United States and many other countries has led to the success and ease of communication between people and Twitter is certainly in the middle of that,” Levin said to AFP. “People obviously want to communicate and Twitter is really a communications platform.”

Facebook also understands the attractive quality of having real time social interaction.

“The thing they’ve done and MySpace didn’t do is they’ve really expanded the scope of their network past the initial site,” Keath told AFP. “Facebook Connect is a big piece of that, where you can take your Facebook account and log in from other places.”

Facebook and Twitter are successful because they “provide real value to people in their personal and work lives,” Stanzel adds. “You can keep up with hundreds if not thousands just by having a Facebook account or by being active on Twitter.”

Stanzel applauded social media tools with “redefining the way in which companies or politicians relate to their consumers or constituents. Companies or politicians who have taken to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube are building more of a permanent relationship with their constituents or with their customers because they’re engaged in a conversation.”

Keath noted that Twitter’s growth is “going to slow,” calling it ridiculous that Twitter could match Facebook’s user count.

Twitter has to consider users “putting out garbage, bad information, trying to direct message everyone in the entire service, porn links and things like that,” Keath said to Yahoo. “That would cause people to restrict their networks a little more.”

Stanzel warned that if Twitter “starts becoming overrun with advertising or becomes too complicated they might see their growth slow down or even reverse.”

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