@seth

Twitter is a broadcast model, one to many.  A few people tweet a lot, and a lot of people follow them.  It’s like RSS and Blogging before it, not surprising given the roles of @dickc (Feedburner) and @ev (Blogger) running the company. Twitter gives organic rise to celebs on its platform.  The assymetric nature of the follower relationship leads to media hierarchies.  How many followers you have is a direct indication of your influence.  Influence is defined by the amount  of attention you receive relative to the amount of information you provide.  Twitter’s role is to enable audiences to follow the most influential accounts.  Its monetization model will likely be in providing these accounts with analytics and advertising services, on a revenue share basis.

Facebook is a communication model in which lots of people are communicating with lots of other people at the same time.  Most of these users are leaving traces in the form of original input (ie uploading a picture, updating one’s status) and derivative input (ie “liking” somebody’s status, commenting on a picture) into the Facebook social graph processor.  These relationships are symmetrical, and result in a massive number of intimate social interactions rather than a fewer number of larger social events.  Think telephone call, not a sitcom.  Phone company makes a lot of money metering telephone calls.  NBC makes a lot of money selling commercials during 30 Rock.   The tagging of people in pictures, and the notification of such in the news feed, is a great example of how FB leverages explicitly generated social media to create the more scaleable and pure margin implicitly generated social media.

FourSquare is also a communication model, but with the added layer of location.  By virtue of the magic of built-in GPS in smart phones, checking-in has emerged as most efficient means of social media participation.  No mental transaction cost of figuring out what to say in an update or a tweet, the stamping of ones lat/long borders combines a very ligh weight input device (ie hit the check-in button) with rich implicy metadata processed by GPS in the background.  What is also interesting about FourSquare in particular is that they provide a value-added layer on top of Twitter and a tighter social filter on top of the Facebook graph.  Many would argue that the Twitter Geo Location API and/or Facebook enabling their version of “check-ins” will commodify FourSquare; however, the short history of web 2.0 has shown that services that enable a very specific and tactile form of self-expression at the expense of other functionality tend to succeed.