Facebook vs. Twitter

Main Difference

The main difference between Facebook and Twitter is that the Facebook is a global online social networking service and Twitter is a micro-blogging Internet service

• Facebook

  Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

  The founders initially limited the website’s membership to Harvard students. Later they expanded it to higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford University. Facebook gradually added support for students at various other universities, and eventually to high school students. Since 2006, anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old has been allowed to become a registered user of Facebook, though variations exist in this requirement, depending on local laws. The name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students. Facebook held its initial public offering (IPO) in February 2012, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company. It began selling stock to the public three months later. Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertisements that appear onscreen.

  Facebook can be accessed from a large range of devices with Internet connectivity, such as desktop computers, laptops and tablet computers, and smartphones. After registering, users can create a customized profile indicating their name, occupation, schools attended and so on. Users can add other users as “friends”, exchange messages, post status updates, share photos, videos and links, use various software applications (“apps”), and receive notifications of other users’ activity. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups organized by workplace, school, hobbies or other topics, and categorize their friends into lists such as “People From Work” or “Close Friends”. Additionally, users can report or block unpleasant people.

  Facebook has more than 2.2 billion monthly active users as of January 2018. Its popularity has led to prominent media coverage for the company, including significant scrutiny over privacy and the psychological effects it has on users. In recent years, the company has faced intense pressure over the amount of fake news, hate speech and depictions of violence prevalent on its services, all of which it is attempting to counteract.

• Twitter

  Twitter () is an American online news and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled to 280 for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application software (“app”). Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world.Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July of that year. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet”. As of 2018, Twitter had more than 321 million monthly active users. Since 2015 Twitter has been a hotbed of debates and news covering politics of the United States. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter was the largest source of breaking news on the day, with 40 million election-related tweets sent by 10:00 p.m. (Eastern Time) that day.

• Twitter (verb)

  (of a bird) give a call consisting of repeated light tremulous sounds

  “sparrows twittered under the eaves”

  “the swallows were settling to roost with a good deal of twittering”

• Twitter (verb)

  talk in a light, high-pitched voice

  “old ladies in the congregation twittered”

• Twitter (verb)

  talk rapidly and at length in a trivial way

  “‘What a great crowd’, Perry twittered”

  “he twittered on about buying a new workshop”

• Twitter (verb)

  make a posting on the social media application Twitter

  “many active bloggers are twittering more and more these days”

• Twitter (noun)

  a series of short, high-pitched calls or sounds

  “his words were cut off by a faint electronic twitter”

• Twitter (noun)

  idle or ignorant talk

  “drawing-room twitter”