Facebook's latest clone... Twitter?, Adam Elgar

So Facebook are trying to muscle in on Twitter, with an new Public Content Solutions team and trending FB content being featured on NBC.

At first blush this seems like a sensible place for them to focus but as Josh Constine points out further in, people think about networks in fundamentally different ways. And Facebook is not currently thought of as a place for public content.

If they are to succeed in this sector, they should perhaps separate the content into a separate brand - as they have done with Instagram and Slingshot. Most people are aware that Instagram and Slingshot are Facebook properties but still think of them as different networks to be used differently.

Of course, Instagram was not home-baked but there must have been a conversation about whether to fold the networks under one brand.

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To combine real-time public sharing with relevancy-sorted updates from friends, Facebook will have to shake the perception that it’s all about private content. That won’t be easy. On Facebook, sharing to friends-only is the default, which is smart because people expect to speak freely without their posts being visible to the entire planet. But that also means users have to actively switch public sharing on or off. People come to Twitter specifically to share publicly.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/reach-and-identity-vs-real-time/