Fun With TwitterSync
A few weeks ago, I grabbed the TwitterSync application. This application synchronizes your Facebook account status message with your Twitter account. Essentially:
[account name]+[Facebook status] = The answer to “What are you doing?”
Theoretically, TwitterSync serves a useful purpose – To simplify the management of social networking tools by automatic information population of two fields that address the same or similar question.
Sample Facebook status messages:
- An is happy to be at work!
- An is packing for vacation!
- An is getting coffee for her boss!
- An is meeting wonderful new people!
Take off the “An is” and voila – length appropriate copy bites, appropriate for tweets. Since Facebook recently removed the “is” from the user interface, you have:
- An resents being cold, wet, and hungry
- An enjoys blogging her face off
- An goes for an early morning run – happy New Year’s!
And so on and so forth.
This doesn’t necessarily answer the question posed by Twitter, nor do my Tweets make sense with my name in front of them. I use Twitter to communicate with others in the social networking/Web 2.0/social media space, find out what’s happening in the industry, see what others are writing, thinking and yes, doing.
For Twitter, I’ll drop tinyurls to things I think my followers might be interested in. I’ll tweet (microcomment) directly @ someone, in response to a question tweeted or comment made by someone else.
In actuality, TwitterSync doesn’t really work for me, because my Facebook and my Twitter serve different purposes for my followers and my social network. My Facebook is much more social in nature – I’m more informal. My Twitter, while informal, is much more oriented to providing value to others in the industry.
Do my Facebook Friends care about what my Twitter Followers care about? I think not. Let me know what you think in the comments, post to my Facebook Wall, or tweet@me (@anwith1n).
February 1st, 2008 at 6:52 am
My audience has not split enough at this point to really say that what I tweet is not relevant to my Facebook audience so in my case, I don’t think they really matter. My stance is also likely heavily influenced by the fact that many of my facebook friends also happen to twitter *and* also send their twitter to their facebook so it’s not bad.
I also just don’t have an interest in updating two statuses. If twitter will demonstrate what I happen to be doing, even overly-frequently, it serves my purposes just fine I think. I even get comments on my Facebook wall periodically referencing links in my status even though they aren’t clickable.
Who knows, maybe the general consensus of my facebook friends would suggest otherwise — that it’s not very successful and they’d rather I shut my trap and conform like I’m supposed to.