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"Twitter is one of the most viral platforms on the social web.  One link can be spread to millions of people in a matter of minutes.  Perhaps the primary reason for this is the Twitter retweet (or \"RT\"), which provides Twitter users an easy way to share interesting updates from people they are following. We even wrote a guide on the retweet.\nFacebook on the other hand is many magnitudes bigger, but doesn't have the same viral power that Twitter contains.  Why?  The big reasons are probably the closed nature of Facebook streams, the lack of a real-time search engine, and no comparable \"retweet\" syntax.  While Facebook is tackling the first two, the third one may be what trips up Facebook's assault on Twitter.\nPublic Profiles and Sharing With Everyone\n\n\n\n\nFirst problem: Facebook is a closed platform.  On Twitter, over 90% of profiles are public, allowing anyone to see tweets and share them.  On Facebook, the reverse is true: most user profiles are private and only friends can see information.  Part of this is because the option to make your profile public only arrived in March.  It's still all about friends, not about sharing.\nYet Facebook allowing for open profiles is a big step towards making information more shareable on the social network.  We've also heard that options to broadcast your updates to the public are also in the works, which would be another smart move to open the platform while appeasing users worried about privacy.\nReal-time search is coming\n\n\n\n\nSecond problem: Facebook doesn't have real-time search.  Part of Twitter's major success is due to its popular Twitter Search, which has become the de-facto place to search for real-time information on events.  Trending topics help show what people are buzzing about at any point in time. \nFacebook began addressing this weakness last week when it announced its own Facebook real-time search engine, which will search public profiles, pages, and the updates of your friends.  As you can see from the screenshot above, it works a lot like Twitter search, but has the advantage of being able to pull from Facebook's vast image and video library.  Combined with public profiles and the ability to broadcast your updates publicly, Facebook real-time search could be very successful.\nRS: Facebook's Version of the Twitter Retweet?\n\n\n\n\nHere's the problem that's most difficult to address: a culture of publicly sharing updates.  Currently, there is no retweeting culture on Facebook.  People share links, but they don't tend to redistribute actual status updates to the rest of their friends.  There are two reasons for this: names aren't clickable like they are on Twitter, and there's no universal syntax for \"retweeting.\"  Yes, there is a \"share\" button under most Facebook status updates and posts, but it only applies to links, not the content of the original messages.\nWhile we haven't seen Facebook do anything to address the first issue, we actually have seen a syntax for Facebook \"retweeting\": the Reshare, or RS.  It's just like the RT, but uses RS and name of the originator of the status update.  I have only seen it in use twice or three times on Facebook, but that's better than none.  On the other hand, the originator of the syntax is actually Randi Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook's political and social initiatives and sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, so it's not exactly an organic movement underway.  \nCould the \"RS\" syntax catch on?  Possibly, but only if Facebook adds the option to publicly broadcast messages, a strong real-time search engine, and the ability to click on a reshared username.  In other words, Facebook has a long way to go before it can compete with Twitter as a viral platform.  A lot of it depends on how they build features and whether users buy into Facebook's new direction."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/06/22/reshare-on-facebook/>