Social networks are hard to navigate. On Twitter, it's easy to slip from tasteful self promotion into crass bragging. On Facebook, attempts at online humor can end up as angry family feuds. And for the uninitiated -- and sometimes, even for seasoned users -- literally finding your way around these services can be a nightmare.
And yet the companies behind them seem intent on making these services even harder to use. They keep blurring the lines between one service and another. The latest example: Twitter is testing a redesign (see right) that makes it look an awful lot like Facebook, according to a report from news site Mashable. Twitter wants its service to serve as more than just a flow of news and other public information. It's trying to beef up its private messaging tools so that they become just as prominent.
Meanwhile, Facebook wants to handle more than just your family and friend connections. It wants to juggle news too. In recent years, it has evolved to look more and more like Twitter. Even LinkedIn, a social network originally intended for professional use, now lets you share photos, videos, links, and personal thoughts -- much like Twitter and Facebook.
In other words, all the biggest social networks are determined to turn themselves into one-stop shops for all your online social needs.
The problem is: Real people don't want to use them that way. In its 10 years of existence, Facebook has failed -- time and again -- to coax users into posting different streams of information for different audiences. It has even developed clever technology to sort your contacts into special lists with labels like "close friends," "family," "co-workers," and acquaintances, but, as far as I can tell, very few people actually use them.
Twitter has long given people the power to create private feeds that came be viewed only be certain people, but users typically ignore this too. Twitter is most effective as means of broadcasting stuff to the world at large.
The real-world evidence, then, indicates that while people are happy to use social media in different ways for different audiences, they want a distinct service for each use case. Few are complaining that they have too many social media logins and need to consolidate. Instead, they find it too hard to use the social media we already have, particularly while maintaining privacy.
Wall Street wants Twitter to grow more quickly and find a place in the mainstream, a message sent loud and clear by the recent drop in the company's share price. But it shouldn't muddle what makes it distinct from the rest. If it turns itself into Facebook, there's no reason to use it. Over 1.2 billion people are already using the real thing.
