During the quarterly earnings call of Twitter, CEO Dick Costolo unwrapped some infant plans to catapult the micro-blogging site to the level of success Facebook has reached. It turned out, the scheme is reminiscent of past moves to take inspiration from Facebook’s design and style.
Costolo told the press that Twitter is not ruling out the idea of changing how Twitter operates in order to deliver services meant to address the gap between the signup output and value creation for investors. That is to say, Twitter is willing to implement an algorithmic timeline that resembles that of Facebook. This as the website aims for growth.
Over the coming months, therefore, we can expect Twitter to unveil major redesign and revamp to the social networking site as Costolo has promised a number of experiments up the sleeve of his team.
This is just part of a string of updates to Twitter that have taken their cue from Facebook. More and more, with each update being implemented, users are seeing less and less differences between Twitter and Facebook. Take the physical design of both websites, from the header photo to the positioning of profiling picture as an inset on the left side of the header. Also, the personal data are all listed in one side.
Beyond the design, Twitter and Facebook also share close similarities in features. For example, Facebook unveiled its trending topics in January this year in a move to edge out Twitter in the fight to provide real-time updates for popular topics in social media. We are also receiving reports that Twitter is planning to ditch the @reply function in a transition to the mentioning feature that Facebook has popularized, though still inspired by Twitter.
And most recently, Facebook launched the Mentions app, a Twitter-style feature to reply to posts that is especially helpful for celebrities.
Back to the earnings call, Twitter was able, if only unwittingly, to dissolve doubts around its capability to grow. The company posted $312.2 million in double revenue rise and an increase in monthly active users by 271 million, up 24 percent from a year ago. Twitter also attributed four-fifths of its ad revenue to mobile platforms during the last quarter of 2014.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Twitter tops the growing social networking sites, with upbeat anticipation of an increase in user base by more than 30 percent before this year ends. With Twitter on track for growth, however, users must have the assurance that no drastic changes are coming to the website that compromises comfort of use.
Disclosure: We might earn commission from qualifying purchases. The commission help keep the rest of my content free, so thank you!
