

Why Do I Need Facebook When I Have Twitter - grellas
http://www.jasonmendelson.com/wp/archives/2010/02/why-do-i-need-facebook-when-i-have-twitter.php

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tptacek
I'd be embarassed if I had 1,000 Facebook friends. I have an almost-absolute
pure-passive default allow policy on Facebook (that's the benefit I get from
it over LinkedIn, where I am default deny), and I have something like 100
friends. I know almost all of them face to face. Many of them are actually
friends of mine.

Almost 1500 people follow me in Twitter. I know very few of them.

The two are entirely different services. I get that the author is comparing
the Facebook wall to Twitter, but I don't use Facebook for the wall (in fact,
I find Facebook news updates almost intolerable for the same reason he does).

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metamemetics
Agreed!I use facebook for:

A) Keeping in casual contact with large number of friends when a phone call
out of the blue would be too intruding\unexpected.

B) Finding bar nights\parties by promotion groups.

I've never used it for blogging\micro-blogging (even though it has these
features). Facebook news updates actually work well IF you block everyone you
don't care about, which would be impossible to do if you used his friending
strategy...

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timdorr
A lot of this is subjective, depending on how your friends use either service.
For instance, I have a lot of friends that post photos on Facebook and other
interesting things in their streams. Twitter is more conversational, as I
don't tend to follow a lot of people that post nothing but links and retweets.
I have a different experience from others who have friends that do post those
things a lot.

I do have a nit to pick the Privacy and Spam sections.

With privacy, he's basing his results on speculation. Facebook is _far_ more
granularity and control over the content you post on the service. Twitter
offers you a single switch to either protect all your content or none of it.
There's no in-between.

On spam, is he friggin' kidding? I can't tell you how many spam bots follow me
or @mention me with crap (and no way to block them!) on a _daily_ basis.
Facebook has the option to hide individual posts, entire users/pages, and
particular content sources (such as Facebook for iPhone or Ping.fm posts). I
never get any spam on Facebook and anything I get that's annoying I have a
decent amount of granular control over what gets displayed. I'm not sure how
Twitter can win on this one.

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tptacek
I have, to my memory, never seen Twitter spam. I have more followers than you
do. What am I doing right?

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bilch
I run several twitterbots. The ones that autofollow back used to attract large
numbers of spammers (until I fixed that). The others don't. I guess the usual
spam strategy is "follow - wait a few days for reciprocation - leave if it
doesn't happen". So the amount of Twitter spam you see probably depends on
your willingness to follow back anyone and everyone just because they follow
you.

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tptacek
Interesting. I don't "follow back" at all, because I turned off notification
of when people are following me. I follow people who say interesting things
that land on my radar, and that's it.

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jsharpe
If he's added 200 friends in the last month and has a bunch of friends that he
doesn't actually know (since by his own admission, he doesn't turn down any
friend requests), then he's using Facebook incorrectly and it's no wonder he
doesn't find it useful. Facebook is at its best when you can see what's going
on with your actual friends. If you have hundreds of non-friends cluttering
your feed, that interest evaporates.

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sjs382
Stopped reading at "I have 1,110+ friends on Facebook."

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mortenjorck
It sounds like the author is using Facebook as if it were Twitter and Twitter
as if it were Facebook.

Stop laughing, I'm serious.

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kwamenum86
Skip this. By his own admission, the author was heavily medicated at the time
of writing.

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acgourley
I don't like his argument that you can just un-follow spammy friends. What if
you still want a few major updates from them? Facebook allows you to slice the
information semantically instead of just by tag or source.

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mambodog
the interesting thing for me is how much facebook users (or at least, the ones
I am 'friended to') seem to want facebook to be more twitter-like. in both of
its last two site redesigns, the twitter-esque 'status updates' feed has
become more and more buried in the nav, now requiring two clicks from the main
page to access. many facebook users seem unaware that it even exists, and
complain about it regularly. instead facebook forces users to use the nebulous
'news feed' by default, which doesn't even manage to get things in
chronological order (sometimes).

