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Tim O’Reilly.

And:

“There’s a real lesson to Facebook here about giving other services (like Twitter) access to their social graph. They have the best one going, but because they try to keep users coming back to their interface, and even the applications built on their service have to live in Facebook, they end up as a ghetto rather than a true internet service. It’s the data, not the interface! Let other people use your data, build on it, and it will still belong to you. Hold it too tight, and they will compete with it.”

(via betaworks)

I began this essay as an email response to a friend, but it got long and I figured it was probably worth sharing and getting some feedback on.

The question was: tell me as a user why FB connect matters to me?

Answer:

Simplicity is Twitter’s biggest strength—the 140 character limit is quite a lucky constraint that amazingly the Twitter guys have stuck with. Lots of people talk about the ease of posting to Twitter, but I think the value is in ease of consumption. It’s precisely because photos, videos, etc, are not inline that Twitter is fun and easy to consume.

The other key thing with Twitter is something O’Reilly talks about in this post—the ability to follow someone without requiring reciprocation. This is the essential difference between Twitter and Facebook, the difference between the social graphs they are building. Facebook is a social graph that is like your home—a place where you interact with friends and family. Twitter is a social graph more like a bar, where you can walk up to and chat with anyone. The things you say and do at home, in your comfort zone, are more personal and honest than at the bar. This is why Facebook spends so much time and effort building privacy controls and communicating how these controls work to users. They want people to feel safe and free to be honest.

Whether or not people post more honestly on Facebook than Twitter (I think they do, but my argument does not rest on this), let’s get back to the difference between the social graphs and reciprocation. Because Facebook requires reciprocation, I argue that the connections you have to your Facebook friends are tighter than those you have to your Twitter friends. You probably have known your Facebook friends longer and better than your Twitter friends, and have met almost everyone one of your Facebook friends face-to-face. (This the case for me and most of the people I know on Facebook, but I’d love to see a survey of a younger demo.) Twitter friends, on the other hand, are looser connections—industry / business contacts, people you saw Tweet about your favorite song, people building things you think are cool. These are all interesting and valuable connections, but they are not as deep and personal as Facebook connections.

The essential difference here is not simply that you may have known Facebook friends longer or met them in person; it is that as a result of the type of connections Facebook facilitates and encourages, you have more contextual data about each of your Facebook friends that helps you understand their opinions and the things they write and share and do.

Experiment: look at the first few pages of your Facebook friends and the first few pages of your Twitter friends. Now, for how many people in each set can you answer these questions. Do I like the same restaurants as this person? Do I have the same tastes in music and movies as this person? How likely am I to meet up with this person in the next 2 months? For me, Facebook friends are more reliable / trusted opinions across the board. My Twitter friends win for things like “how likely am I to read something this person is reading on the internet,” but I think that is because Twitter skews toward web-hip types. Perhaps, in a year, I’ll consult my Twitter friends for online/web related opinions and Facebook friends for product/local/enterntainment opinions. I don’t mind having these two networks as data sources, but Facebook just seems like more valuable data.

Here’s why I think Facebook’s data is more valuable. Given your ability to understand friends’ opinions based on context, try this second experiment. Do a search for a digital camera you’re thinking of buying, or “mexican food, lower east side,” or health insurance. Take the top 200 results from either Google or Microsoft (top 10 differ, but top 200 are probably pretty close), resort these results based on shared data from your friends—use Tweets, Facebook status messages, photos, reviews, blog posts, etc. Regardless of where or how this data is published, if you have closer connections to your Facebook friends than with your Twitter friends, the data from them is more useful and easily understandable, helps you make better decisions in choosing a restaurant or deciding to buy a product.

Facebook Connect is the first place we’ll see your Facebook social graph overlayed on top of external data, like search results or restaurant reviews ( I think CitySearch is one of the launch partners, in fact—this will be infinitely more valuable to me than Yelp because Yelp has 0 context to me and is as good as average ratings and the opinion of the masses).

That’s my longwinded answer of why you should care about Facebook Connect as a user—it’s a filter for the ever increasing amount of data on the web.

I’ll close with this point: I completely agree that Facebook is more closed than Twitter. This is precisely why I think it’s more valuable. Facebook maps to real world in it’s closed-ness. Relationships take time, trust must be earned. I think both Facebook and Twitter will earn most of their revenue through contextualized search, both will be valuable filters, but Facebook will probably be a better filter for most searches, because the Facebook social graph will give a more understandable and trusted set of filters.