Reading List: Twitter Wants to be Facebook?

Each day, we’ll list the five stories from around the Web that Digiday’s editors think deserve the most attention.

Twitter Wants to be Facebook? Mashable’s Adam Ostrow takes to CNN to make his case that Twitter’s gunning to replace Facebook as a primary social network. Ostrow’s evidence: Twitter recently added photo and video sharing. Now Twitter has maintained it’s an “information network.” Its executives have taken to defining its mission: “to instantly connect people to the information most important to them.” That would make it an information network, not really a social network. Ostrow is having none of it, arguing that by adding photo and video sharing, the most popular activities on social networks, Twitter is declaring itself a social network. (The company wasn’t convinced, as one of its reps took to, naturally, Twitter to tweak Ostrow’s thesis.) These arguments rarely get very far — or matter much in the long run. For a long time, bloggers engaged in spirited debates over Google’s contention it wasn’t a media company, despite a business that relied on advertising for nearly all its revenue. Whether Google is a tech or media company, though, isn’t the most important. Likewise, for Twitter it’s more important that it come up with ways of turning all that attention into revenue. Advertisers continue to be frustrated by the difficulty of running large-scale campaigns on Twitter. CNN