Facebook or Twitter?
Joe Johnson, one of my tweeples
Joe Johnson (@joerjohnson) asked me an interesting question:
What social technology do you find most useful? Twitter, Facebook … ? And why?
Well… it depends. It depends on the context of use.
Facebook is a useful tool for organizing information about people you’ve met and/or know. I miss the days when users were grouped by affinity, such as which college they attend or attended.
- Newsfeed and status updates allow you to have ambient awareness of your group of friends who use Facebook regularly.
- Instant messaging and email-like functionality provide “private” synchronous and asynchronous communication.
- Pages and groups give users places to signal affinity - be it to a business, service, or by common interest.
All of the above, in addition to link sharing, note sharing, social commenting, and ninjas, what more does anyone want in a social network?
All of the above functionality is useful, but sometimes it’s too much. The time and number of screens it takes to click around to accomplish goals can get frustrating.
Sometimes you want something a bit more lightweight.
Enter Twitter.
Twitter is a water cooler or cocktail party. Individual tweets may not say that much, but when taken in the aggregate, can paint a picture of the user. The 140 character limit drives brevity and makes it lightweight to use. The ability to update via 3d party application, SMS, or web provides users with options for what makes sense for their lives.
Apps such as TwitterSync allow you to update Twitter and Facebook status at the same time.
Ultimately, the tools I find most useful allow me to connect with my community - if they’re using Twitter, I’ll use Twitter. If they’re on Facebook, I’ll be on Facebook. The ability to use them all together is really what drives the value. And this is just from a consumer facing perspective…
I’ll leave the Enterprise 2.0 discussion for another blog post. 
March 7th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Nice post. I think search might be the big difference to me at the moment. And search ultimately gives Twitter a little more utility for current events. When I use search.twitter.com, I feel like I can aggregate content on very specific places or incidents. For example, I can see what’s happening in a certain area or how people are feeling about a certain product. With Facebook, I haven’t found a way to do that. It feels like archived status messages disappear entirely.
March 7th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Matt, great point about search. Couple that with a RSS feed, and brand managers, consumer insight folks, and anyone else with interest will get more signal, less noise. Thanks so much for your comment!