Mark Zuckerberg says he was afraid the microblogging site's growth would outpace that of the social network
Mark Zuckerberg says he was afraid the microblogging site's growth would outpace that of the social network Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, has admitted that he paid Twitter "too much attention" out of fear that Twitter's growth would outpace that of the social network.
Talking to Inside Facebook, a news site dedicated to the social network, Zuckerberg said, "As good as I think they [Twitter] are, I think I personally just paid too much attention to it."
Post failing to acquire Twitter in 2008, Facebook introduced real-time status updates to its news feed, a feature which heavily resembled Twitter's 140 character tweets. Zuckerberg has now conceded that he felt threatened by Twitter's fast user growth. "I look at their rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they're [Twitter] going to be bigger than us ufffdIt just turned out that their growth rate was kind of unnatural. They got a lot of media attention, and it grew very quickly for a little period of time," he said.
Zuckerberg believes that the major difference between the "very nice simple service", as he describes Twitter, and Facebook, is that Twitter isn't about using your real identity, as Facebook is ufffd it's more about self-expression.
