Facebook Loses When It Tries To Be Twitter

BY Rocco Pendola|01/21/14 -

EW YORK (TheStreet) -- It's so weird when stuff like this happens ...

Call me a lost cause loser, but -- literally -- the first thought that entered my mind when I woke up Sunday morning was ... Facebook (FB_) is failing miserably and will continue to fail miserably at curating its users' news feeds.

Not more than an hour later, I got online and came across two stories that, by some sort of synchronicity, got right at what I was thinking. I could claim original thought and not cite these articles, but I'm not a hack. Plus they're two solid reads well worth your time.

Both moved my noodling along, ultimately leading me to conclude that something I wrote in August 2012 -- Twitter Will Live and Facebook Will Die -- will end up playing itself out.

Facebook has no business competing with Twitter (TWTR_). And it's making a grave strategic error trying to do so.

In Business Insider's Blogger Nails A Major Problem With Facebook's Newsfeed, Paul Szoldra cites the experience of a social media star who chides Facebook for keeping content from you. Simply put, if you follow somebody or are friends with them on FB, you only see a fraction of what they post.

On some level, this makes no sense.

But, as Kurt Wagner shows over at Mashable in How to Curate Your Facebook News Feed, you can take control over your news feed and create, for yourself, more relevant personalization.

As the need for a How to Curate Your Facebook News Feed article shows, Facebook is doing an awful job at personalization. Anybody with a Facebook page knows this firsthand. Whose feed isn't littered with irrelevant ads, stories from the same news outlets over and over and over againand political rants from whacked out high school friends you thought you unfollowed during the last election.

The (well-done) Mashable tutorial shouldn't be necessary because Facebook shouldn't even be trying to, in Mark Zuckerberg's words, be "the best personalized newspaper in the world."

As I argued in the above-linked August 2012 piece, why is Facebook emulating Twitter -- the long-established modern day version of the newspaper:

Facebook is a sustainable fad. In other words, it serves a purpose. It has a much brighter future than its bandwagon-jumping critics think. But, it will never be in Twitter's league in any capacity, from being useful to making the smooth transition to an IPO ...

When I claim Facebook will die, I'm talking five, 10, 15, maybe 20 years from now. In our world, that's an eternity. Twitter, meantime, is everything the television news networks wish they could be -- instant, relevant and used heavily by a relatively young audience.

Here's the problem at Facebook ...