Facebook vs. Twitter
The best way to compare Twitter and Facebook is to look at the old children's story The Tortoise and the Hare. — For those that don't remember curling up in bed as a child, listening to an adult narrate it, this is the old fable of an arrogant hare who loses a race to a slow tortoise.
Context & Ripple Effects
The framing lands three days after Facebook completed what was billed as the largest technology IPO in American history — an all-night hackathon on the eve, then a debut that closed up just 23 cents, with retail investors speculating and public backlash dismissed by some commentators as investor whining. Against that anticlimax, Bits reaches for The Tortoise and the Hare: Twitter the fast, arrogant hare, Facebook the slow-but-steady tortoise.
The rivalry has a documented history in this corpus. In February 2009 Twitter drew half the press coverage of Facebook on a fraction of the traffic, and by September 2009 Facebook had dismissed Twitter as being "in its rear-view mirror" even as it blinked and copied Twitter's features. What changes this week is that Facebook is now a public company with a stock price attached, so the comparison stops being about buzz and becomes about who can justify a valuation.
First-order effects
- Facebook now answers to quarterly earnings rather than press cycles, so every product decision — including whatever it borrowed from Twitter — gets priced by the market instead of debated by bloggers.
Second-order effects
- Twitter, still private, gains a live benchmark: Facebook's flat debut sets the market's opening bid for how much a social network's growth is actually worth, which Twitter will face whenever its own listing question arrives.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social platforms get judged as advertising businesses rather than media phenomena — a shift that rewards the tortoise's revenue discipline and punishes the hare's attention-first model when valuations come due.
The trend: Social networking is moving from a press-coverage contest to a public-markets valuation contest, with Facebook's IPO marking the point where traffic narratives must convert into earnings.