Facebook and Twitter's brainchildren in a brawl

- Dipo Doherty

Facebook, a company renowned for its innovation and revolution, brought about a new era to the world: the era of social communication. The company is headed by the far from charismatic founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in the light of it all was able to convince the general public to ride on the S.S. Facebook. Fast forward a few years later. Twitter, a company with a different approach to social communication, showed the world that if you force people to do things your way (140 character restriction) and get a celebrity to frantically endorse your product, you just might be successful.

There comes a time in any company’s life cycle where the need for innovation is overshadowed by an overpowering need for growth. And as we can clearly see, both companies are approaching this peak. Just like any weary father, who is looking to protect his family’s lineage, they find worthy suitors to join the family.

Facebook made the jaw breaking bargain to acquire the new movie star on the block (Instagram) for over a billion big ones. A bargain which left some confounded as to the logic of spending so much on an app that hasn’t been able to make profits. Now we can keep arguing as to the real impact of Instagram has on Facebook, but we know its a done deal. Twitter seized a good opportunity, to acquire their latest weapon in their arsenal: Vine, a year before they launched. Vine incorporated some of twitter’s core values (restrict people even more and give them an opportunity to be creative), and this philosophy seemed to work.

At around 2pm on June 20th, Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom presented a new feature to the world, in a move to innovate and raise optimism for shareholders. This update featured the new and innovative Facebook video on Instagram. This new feature lets users of Instagram take 15 second video clips and share them with your friends. You could also apply a new palette of filters to these video bites, which seemed quite similar to the photo filters we’ve grown to love but thats fine. But here is the issue, doing this has put them in the boxing ring with Twitter’s Vine which does the same thing minus 8 seconds and the filters. Now I know a lot of critics have called this a cheap shot on Facebook’s part, a less than innovative way to join the video market. Lets cut it and go straight to the point, Instagram just pulled… continue reading