I spent most of this afternoon looking at different options to promote TrAvid. The immediate problem facing TrAvid right now is the lack of users. And being a user-generated-content site, this poses more risks than running backward in the middle of the road at 2am while being blind folded.
In order to solve this problem, I am looking at the potentials to integrate TrAvid’s authentication system with Facebook or Twitter.
After following a tutorial session on how to use Facebook Connect and reading Facebook Connect vs Twitter Oauth, I realized that the ultimate differentiators between the two lies on 1. Time (OAuth being simpler to deal with than Facebook Connect) 2. Technology 3. How suitable these APIs can be used to leverage your website.
First, as a massive social networking website, Facebook has grown drastically from a dorm floor application to a bloated, complex and frequently-changed-so-you-have-to-relearn-everything system. This makes developing anything on Facebook a complicated task. Twitter, on the other hand, is still a simple (insert your own description) service.
Second, Facebook is developed using PHP, and the official libraries and examples are only available in PHP. On the other hand, Twitter started out as a Rails shop. This makes integration with Rails sites a relatively easier task compared to Facebook.
Most importantly, however, the real differentiator comes when you consider how these APIs can be used to promote your site. Arguably, everything in Facebook is built on friendships. There is you, and your friend, and your friends’ friends. For twitter, though, the concept of follower is relatively simpler, and less prone to complicated privacy headaches. This difference becomes painfully clear when you consider how users’ twits or messages are searched in twitter and Facebook. This REALLY is what makes Twitter such a powerful platform compared to Facebook. For business, companies can have followers. Whereas, such equivalent concept in Facebook will be absurd. That’s why they created Facebook groups to solve this problem. And for developers, this creates an extra layer of complexity to solve on its own.
So, the decision to integrate with Twitter is a no brainer for TrAvid at this point. As a one developer Rails shop that would benefit from Twitter’s Twits system. I hope I made the right decision… Now the task is to invite all my friends to join Twitter. Hopefully, they all read the following post…
