The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Twitter's redesign confirms what we feared – it's morphing into Facebook

By Iona St Joseph

April 10, 2014 | 4 min read

Twitter’s redesign confirms what we had all feared

This week Twitter announced its new timeline redesign, which was as everyone (me) had been dreading. The new-look Twitter profile looks uncannily like Facebook, and it’s definitely not just me that thinks that. Honestly.

With new pinned tweets, bigger images and a wider cover photo, it really does seem like the two platforms are just merging into each other.

The new Twitter will be available to current users in the near future, but it will be available to new users immediately. From previous articles, it would appear that Twitter is making the changes because new users, who are used to Facebook, find the site too hard to use. Now, if you ask me, that’s just a bit lazy. I mean, how inept do they think people actually are that they can’t work out how to use a social media platform? And for those people that give up on Twitter because it’s too hard to use, you don’t know what you’re missing out on. No one that isn’t a parent enjoys being on Facebook any more, so why is Twitter pandering to the wants and needs of people that don’t understand what it does anyway? Because it wants more users, and it doesn’t really care who they are and what they do, just that they come to the site.It’s been good while it lasted Twitter. I’m gonna miss you buddy.Facebook passes 100M users in IndiaIndia has become the second country in the world to reach 100 million Facebook users, hitting the landmark on 31 March.The surge of users in India has been spurred on by the mobile phone, with 84 million of the total 100 million users accessing the site via a mobile device. The USA is leading in the Facebook users stakes, with around 183 million users, and Brazil comes in at third with 83 million (as of December 2013).Never one to set his sites low, Mark Zuckerberg is now aiming for 1 billion users in India. Who knows how long that will take, but if Facebook can get over 100 million in 10 years, the only way is up!First ever photo from space posted to InstagramInstagram has managed to rack up an achievement that Facebook and Twitter can be jealous of: the first picture to ever be uploaded from space has been done on its platform (and as we all know, pictures are the don of social media content).Unsurprisingly, and somewhat disappointingly, it’s a selfie, but it’s a selfie on board the International Space Station, which makes it super duper cool. The picture was uploaded to the official Instagram account of the ISS and shows American astronaut Steven Swanson floating around, as astronauts do, inside the Space Station.
We had the first space tweet back in 2009, when astronaut Mike Massimino became the first person to tweet from orbit, keeping it cool with “Launch was awesome!”. Now that we’be had our first visual space update, who knows what will be next? A space Vine? Google Hangouts on Mars?! The opportunities are endless!YouTube wants you to build a fanbase, not an audienceAlex Carloss, YouTube’s global head of entertainment, has encouraged users of the site to focus their efforts on building “fanbases” rather than just settling with an audience on their channels. According to Carloss, an audience simply tunes in, whilst a fanbase chooses when to watch, and they share, comment, curate and create too. How you actually differentiate between the two is anybody’s guess, but go forth and create fanbases, video chums. Facebook app is what’s rinsing your batteryFear no longer iPhone users, they’ve found the problem! Apparently it’s Facebook’s app that has been causing people problems with battery life on their iPhones. According to two developers, who have been working separately, Facebook’s repeated polling of its systems for new posts and data is the principal cause of the battery issues. Now, I’m not entirely sure what that means, mainly because that sentence is longer than my attention span, but also because I don’t use an iPhone. If you have a battery life complaint, the thing you need to be doing, according to ex-Apple Genius bar employee Scott Loveless, is "Disable Background App Refresh for Facebook or other apps you don't absolutely need to stay up-to-date all the time”.

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +