Web2.0, or the social web, or whatever buzzword you want to apply to the current state of the interwebs is a great place. The number of options for keeping in touch with people and sharing information is infinite (yes, there are that many). Unfortunately, I don’t think that more is better in this case. Take Twitter and Facebook for example. These are the most popular social networking services right now. They are similar in some ways, yet fundamentally different in others.
Twitter and Facebook are broken together. Independently they serve a specific purpose, yet they just aren’t meant to be together.
Here’s the problem: I use both of these services and for the portions of the services that overlap, I really only want to use one service. Unfortunately, the two services don’t work well with each other and I end up having to maintain both at the same time. Here’s my breakdown of the good and bad of twitter and facebook.
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My ideal world would take the best of both worlds and combine them into a single service. I really like to be able to check twitter updates from just about anywhere, but I’d like to be able to dig further into a more feature-rich service like facebook (sans quizzes, of course) — a two-tier system of sorts. I would also like to have the multitude of clients that I use to view the posts somehow know what I have and have not seen yet so that I don’t miss any messages aimed directly at me.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you use either/both of these services? Am I missing something here?
2 Comments
Stephen Andert · May 11, 2009 at 2:43 pm
I am just starting to dabble in FB, but have found it easy to block applications which means I never get “poked”, “kidnapped” a second time.
I find it interesting to see how well some companies are using Twitter and wonder why others are still resisting SM.
Josh Gormley · May 12, 2009 at 9:12 am
I agree that some businesses are really using twitter well (newspapers are a good example), but I wonder how well twitter will handle the bulk that comes with millions and millions of users. I’m already feeling overwhelmed by the number of tweets I get from the 49 people I follow, and that’s only 49 people!