Thanks to the advancement of technology, we can enjoy SNS services with a large capacity of storage. We can share your daily photos, movies and diaries. Facebook is currently world wide standard SNS services, especially for people in universities.
However, situation is different in Japan.
From the middle 2000, the major SNS services was "mixi". Now, the main services change from mixi to twitter though a lot of people still use mixi and the company are continue to growing. Facebook is still not popular in Japan.
The popularity of twitter come from difference between English and Japanese. If you use twitter in Japanese, you would notice that the information, which can be described in twitter with its limit of 140 characters, is more than English. Therefore, twitter is very useful for simple discussion. If you see the tweet, name of posts by twitter, of some professors in universities looks like some article in magazine.
If you use twitter, it is very convenient to manage the information because twitter open their API and third party can make services easily. Hence a lot of people develop some useful services. It seems such variety of services increase the value of twitter as a media. Facebook contains a lot of useful tools as it is. On the other hand, if you want to communicate people, twitter seems to be more useful.
Open API of twitter enable us to use a lot of web services
It is reported that the user of facebook is 380 million while twitter is 180 million. As you are not necessary to see advertisement when you see twitter, twitter is not so attractive for companies as a purpose of advertisement. The difference of finance may result in the future of basic system of both of the system.
Currently, people in Japan use twitter for communication with Japanese and use Facebook for international friends. If you use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, you can use these two service at the same time. I guess the difference of these two services disappear sometime.
