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Saying "Streams are built out of subscriptions ('following'), not 'friendship'" is something twitter got right over facebook is totally missing the point. Facebook is about real (meat-space) friends, not random geeky egomaniacs like on twitter. Apples to oranges.

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But a subscription is a simpler building block, that allows for a wider variety of relationships. With Facebook, every relation must be symmetric; with Twitter, relations are symmetric by choice; you can have friends (you add them, and they add you), but also fans, without having to extend the feature set or invent new terms. Facebook, on the other hand, had to create Fan pages, because they didn't have a preexisting verb that users could overload to do the same thing.

True, but they are still different use cases. For example, Facebook friends seem to respond more to my posts than my Twitter followers.

Twitter seems cold and impersonal. Facebook has my friends on it so it's warm and fuzzy.

If facebook had used the verb 'follow' or 'subscribe' to friends, it would be nowhere the size it is now. People would not get it.

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