A long time ago I wrote a post that I’ve been meaning to counter for some time now but I just hadn’t known how to tackle it. But the other day I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who doesn’t use Twitter, and like just about everyone that doesn’t tweet he also thinks it’s kinda shit. He was saying stuff like “isn’t Twitter just the status message of Facebook?” (my second ever tweet!) and I was like “holy crap, I’m having a conversation with myself 8 months ago”, I was talking to the me that wrote that blog post. See I’ve come a long way since I started tweeting, a really long way, and I’d forgotten what the me like then was like, the thoughts that went through my head, so talking to him gave me the insight I needed to get this post written.
Twitter versus Facebook Status Message
This is important to explore, people need to understand this difference. Facebook is a social network whereas Twitter is a micro-blog. In a social network you interact with your pre-selected friends, in a blog you expose yourself to the entire world. I can’t explain it any more simpler than that. He ended up understanding Facebook as having your friends over for dinner whereas Twitter is like hanging out at a rave. I’d say that was pretty accurate regarding the dinner – it’s a closed occasion by invite only (and family members you don’t even like might come by and join in and there’s little you can do about it!), and spot on for the rave analogy and you can see a sideshow below to mirror this.
Still don’t understand why Twitter is different than Facebook Status
But he still didn’t get it. The thing is I happened to know from being friends with him on Facebook that he barely ever updates his status. And he doesn’t blog either. So if you don’t have a desire to talk to the masses then how can you get it? But look, Twitter isn’t just about micro-blogging, it’s also about micro-following…
Follow me, me no follow you
This I love about Twitter. See in Facebook if someone wants to be friends with you then you have to be friends back in order to be connected. And what ends up happening? Noise noise noise. You end up being friends with a shitload of people you don’t care to know about and they drown out everything that the people you are interested with hearing from are doing. But with Twitter someone can follow you and you don’t have to follow them back. This is super powerful.
Real-time Search
Even people that use Twitter don’t understand how powerful it is (so how can those who don’t stand a chance?). Twitter is pure information. Wow I love that so much I’ll say it again. Twitter is pure information. It’s what’s happening right now, and it’s searchable instantly in real-time. Forget TV news, news websites, newspapers, everything that happens these days is reported first on Twitter, instantly and unbiased (there’s very little room for bias in 140 characters, and there’s enough ‘reporters’ to allow to read between the lines of any bias that does come through), when the attacks in Mumbai happened we knew about it first via Twitter, we heard first on Twitter about the intimidation going on during the Afghanistan elections, and when Michael Jackson died no matter where you were or what you were doing, if you had a mobile device and you were on Twitter you knew about it that instant. I even remember during the big webcast for the iPhone OS 3.0 update we all went for lunch and used Twitter for news on the new features.
Hash Tag #help
This is pretty amazing. Twitter has many hidden gems most of which I won’t go into in this article, but something worth a mention is hash tags, and more specifically using them to help you solve a problem. If you are new to the iPhone and are wondering how to save a missed call to your contact list then tweet, or you want to know how to make rounded corners using CCS3. In both cases you would tweet your question with the #help tag, and add #iphone or #css respectively. The web is full of knowledgeable people that like nothing more than to let the world know this by answering your questions.
140 character limit is power
I hear this a lot from non Twitter users and those new to Twitter, wondering when the 140 character limit will be lifted, that’s when they’ll get into Twitter. I know where they’re coming from, I thought the same during my early days of Twitter, it’s seen as a hindrance by outsiders. But those who adopt also adapt and begin to realize how powerful it is. I already said how Twitter is pure information and that’s largely due to this fact, there’s no room to give your opinion when you’re reporting a fact, not space for chitchat when you’re relaying a message, and no squeezing gray between the black and white. When you get used to it you begin to realize how powerful the 140 character limit is, you appreciate how much you can say in 140 characters, and in return how much information you can learn from a handful of tweets.
Conclusion
Twitter is immensely powerful and equally as useful. Most of Twitters power actually lies in its API and the third party apps and services that are built around it, this is something I haven’t really touched on in this article as I looked just to explore the similarities it has with the Facebook status. It isn’t better or worse than Facebook, it’s a very different product built to accomplish a different goal, to fill a very different void. In fact a quote I’ve read before, and I apologize I don’t know who first said it so I choose to credit it to no one, sums it up nicely:
Facebook is for people I went to school with, LinkedIn is for people I’ve worked with, and Twitter is for people I want to know
The point is there’s a place and a need for both Twitter and Facebook.
And finally, below is a very nice deck put together by Iain Taite from Poke which sums up the Twitter party theory:
Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter
nice post but i’m sure you’ve seen this video.
my thoughts exactly:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1909386
Very nice! This is probably my favorite article in your blog to date.
Something weird happened to me while I was reading it: I actually realized that I agree with you a lot more than I thought when we had the original discussion. :)
“Facebook is a social network whereas Twitter is a micro-blog.”
Absolutely. Different tools, different uses, evidenced by different crowds with different goals. I think the minute that you start looking at this topic as different tools with different goals, is when most of the interesting comparisons can take place.
Its not so much VS as it is “which?”. For a lot of people it might be both.
Well done, Rich!
Glad you like. The versus and deathmatch thing was something I came up with for dramatic effect, but yes you’re right, it is “which?” or even just “both”.