Why Do I Need Facebook When I Have Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Why Do I Need Facebook When I Have Twitter

jasonmendelson.com

16 pointsgrellas16 comments

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).

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...

Actually I know a few people who have that many Facebook friends who are real friends. Naturally not all thousand are in this person's current working set, but they all were at some point. It's not so unusual for very popular or clever people to have a large following of others interested in their doings.

I avoided Twitter for a long time, and Facebook for an even longer time, and eventually settled on using them in similar-but-different ways:

* On both I only friend/follow people I actually know and like. I use both primarily to keep up with/talk to my actual friends. But it's a different circle of friends on each service.

* Facebook is locked down (insofar as that's possible), and I keep that down to people I knew in my college days since that's where they all are. I have 26 Facebook friends, and I'm quite proud of that.

* Twitter is my "public face". Mostly I'm following people who live here in town, plus some tech-industry friends scattered around the country. Pickiness about who those people are, though, has left me with a rather lopsided ratio (following about 90, and somehow followed by around 900).

The biggest difference is that public/private distinction; if you try to send me something on Facebook (assuming it lets you), I'll just ignore it. On Twitter I do pay attention to mentions and @-replies, and often that's an easy way for people to ping me when needed.

LinkedIn I still haven't made my mind up about, but probably because I'm not currently looking for a job.

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.

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

that's interesting that you don't see spam on twitter. i stopped having follower emails sent to me, because so many new followers were spam.

the @reply spam is unavoidable, but rare enough that it's just mildly annoying, not a serious issue for me.

I have found on twitter that spammers come after me after I tweet something @ a high profile tweeter. Perhaps this is a factor in the differences in your experiences.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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