Twitter was conceived as a status updater copasetic with sms. Ironically though, it's become a personal broadcast service, while facebook's status updates read like true updates.
We write to an audience, in this case twitter followers or facebook friends. Here facebook has the advantage in that we can take our audience for granted, whereas on twitter our sense of the audience generally diffuse.
Twitter does produce those brief conversational runs -- an effect of the tool's strange manner of creating presence.
Twitter posts are more likely to be conversation starters. and are more talkative. They often invite acknowledgment if not response.
Facebook status updates tend to be tales and statements, told in a non-conversational tone and for the purpose of getting on the radar.
Twitter can be more addictive for the reason that we might itch to check it -- for replies or news. It's more psychological.
Facebook's feed is more of a social utility, and it seems less psychological (there are pokes, walls, and apps for that).
Labels: facebook, social interaction design, social media, twitter
posted by adrian chan at
11:22 AM Comment on this post
Comments: :
Have to disagree about a Twitter audience being more diffuse -- at least not in all cases. If you set your tweets to private, you know your audience. If my tweets were public, not only would I would be saying much less, I would be a lot more careful regarding post content.
I also find it ironic that many friends who refused to even look at Twitter are posting more status updates on Facebook than I will ever tweet!
Good points there and thanks for the comment. Not sure I agree though. It still seems to me that the facebook audience is more reliable. Friend updates appear on every member's news feed (assuming that they're using default settings). Which seems again to be a reason for its popularity. I'm sure I'm not the only one who, given twitter v pownce, is resorting to fbook feeds for that bit of daily bread....
I've asked around and most people seem to page back only one or two pages on twitter (the google number?). So it's easier to miss friend posts than it is on Fbook (twitterholics excepted).
I'd say the reason those friends who frown on twitter do so precisely because its audience seems diffuse and hard to reach: twittering is like posting into the unknown (from their perspective) and compared to Fbook is at best, silly, and at worst, an exercise in vanity.
Ironically, heavy twitter users make it a kind of stuttering conversation, a slow and choppy chat (and if they use IM clients, real messaging) -- which hasn't emerged as a behavior on Fbook.
In the old days we used to sometimes change user profile pics to show solidarity for a meme, (e.g. net censorship), or just for fun. I could see that happening on either. Would be a fun thing to try out.
Hmm, when I go to my FB homepage, I only see the 4 most recent updates up front -- have to click to another page. Just noticed that I could subscribe to a RSS feed, but its still a pain to use that vs. Twitter to see what folks are up to. Or maybe I'm just used to Twitter after all these months and am readjusting to FB life.
My guess is that FB will always be more popular than Twitter because it's an all-in-one tool that can serve as an aggregator (I link to all of my Web 2.0 apps on my page...including Twitter), quasi-address book, and psuedo-Twitter updates. Given how busy folks are, having to use yet another tool -- or a tool for only a single purpose -- can be too much.
I've never subscribed to the IM theory of Twitter. For me, it's microblogging. I had been burned out on blogging until slowly working my way back thanks to regular tweets. I also like the poetic potential of the medium -- convinced an elderly friend who loves creating haikus that Twitter would be a great place to express her work. She did start a blog in a class I taught a while back, but abandoned it within a month because it was too much work. Twitter could be a way to ease non-geeks (i.e. the majority of the planet) who are interested in writing to test the waters.
results on either will of course depend on where you (one) keep your life online... twitter IMHO is for telling, Fbook for updating. different modes of speech.
I've noticed a huge increase among my friends in use of Fbook's status update -- dont know if it's at the expense of twitter or not though.
What struck me was that the Fbook version seemed closer to twitter's original goal.
If twitter has become microblogging then I think that would support my hypothesis, for blog audiences are diffuse when compared to buddy lists, walls, and status updates common to social networks. Unless of course you (one) converse by blogging!
I apparently converse by commenting!
I think while people are tinkering with various features of FB, they stumble across the status feature and find it addicting. No additional cost to sign up for another service like Twitter.
I've seen a noticeable drop in tweets from the few Twitter friends I have. Everyone seems to have caught on to the FB craze.
That said, a lot of it could boil down to privacy options. You can be rather public on FB if you want, including those status updates. The private/public persona issues infiltrate everything in the online world, as usual.
Of course, the irony is that I would have never known about your (insightful) blog had you not attempted to add me as a friend on Twitter. I guess you're a friend of a friend, but I was like, "Who the hell is yet another random person trying to add me as a friend?!" :)
I'll stop conversing-by-comment now!
interesting comments. i've felt that the FB 'is' protocol has the effect of restricting updates to status reports. whereas twitter, being more wide open has, at least in my network, tended to be more of a micro blogging tool (you already said that). i almost view FB feeds as more analogous to twitter because, though they are not overt posts, given that feeds are turned on and you are aware of them, they defacto become more of a micro blogging element. one is completely voluntary on a discrete basis while the other is globally voluntary.
and i'm over thinking it again...
Privacy = private audience. But there's use, also. That there's an an audience doesn't guarantee that it's paying attention. In these lie the advantages of any social network: you know your audience and you know they're there.
Facebook has gone one further and surfaced user activity by generating system messages that are tantamount to user messages. I love it when a friend suddenly gets married, or becomes single, by dint of a profile update posted as a status update ("So and so is now married.") It's tempting to send congratulations!
I do think that it's perhaps less FB protocol (unless you mean social protocol) than the particular way in which it assembles an audience that leads users to write status updates on FB. Same deal for twitter: it's twitter's unique dissembling of the audience (who you follow is not who's following you) and the fact that posts are missed if your audience isnt watching that leads twitter users to post in a form of micro blogging. For example, you wouldnt reply to a status update on FB.
At the end of the day I think all forms of public messaging seek acknowledgment, seek an audience, and its attention. Insofar as tool are able to guarantee one, and insofar as they allow users to define it, they shape our sense of its presence and immediacy.
Social media give us audiences, some broad and public, some narrow and private. I think we always address our messages to an audience, whatever our sense of it may be. And that's something you can glean from the messages themselves. Is what I believe I was trying to say!
These comments are longer than the blog!
I agree that it's more diffuse because it's random who is following you, if you have your posts set to private then it's not true but the majority of people do not set them to private. All I know is I signed up for Twitter and a woman from Jordan started following me 5 minutes later. I guess she found me on the timeline.
I've noticed many of the people who have been on Twitter a long time feel like they're already following too many people so it's ironic that some of the people you follow who post the most and are the most interesting don't follow you in kind. Real powerhouse users who use Twitter as their newsvine to their followers do follow new people as well.
I just think that the biggest difference is facebook items are shorter and the way facebook shares information is kind of vague, and you don't want to change your status too often because one doesn't want to flood your friends news feeds with burritos.
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