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Why Twitter isn't like Facebook

Twitter wants to be more than just the town square to Facebook's town. But can it? When Facebook went public in May 2012, it had 845 million monthly active users. Twitter (about a year younger than Facebook was at IPO time) has a bit less than a quarter the number of users: 215 million. Roughly half of Facebook's users visited the social network via mobile device. With Twitter it's 75 percent. The valuations are also dramatically different. Twitter will have approximately 13 percent of the annual revenue Facebook had when it went public. Facebook was touted as a $100 billion entity, and has grown past that market cap recently, and Twitter will be closer to $10 billion. The data obviously shows that the two services operate on different scales. And it suggests that they appeal to users for different reasons. Facebook is like a pulsing digital city, a vast community of virtual high-rise apartments and huts housing one in seven people on the planet. More than a billion Facebookers are curating and managing their online identities within the network, sharing trillions of pictures, links, likes, chats, and moments in their lives.

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