Thoughts on facebook and twitter

There seems to be a lot of disquiet about the facebook changes. This installment of UI changes are coupled with the obligatory ‘We hate the changes’ groups and polls counting hundreds of thousands of users. Which might be a healthy sign from Facebook’s perspective – every time they roll out changes they resurrect their own groundhog day of protests.

Having recently dusted off my atrophied twitter account and started breathing a little life into it I’m beginning to get a better idea of the content and nature of the micro blogging beast. I was happily surprised to see so many twitterers(?) subscribing to my feed, wrongfully assuming that these people are genuinely interested in what I have to say. Sure, some of them might be – I certainly only subscribe to tweeters(?) that I want to read about, but the whole thing strikes me as a bit more of a marketing tool. Constantly feeds I am subscribed to are posting links to their blog posts, their affiliate’s blog posts, their dog’s blog posts, their pligg installations.

Which is fine, if a certain twit(?) is spamming my home page with their link laden feed then I can unsubscribe to them. Mostly the blog posts are interesting, I like finding all this neat content on the internet that is usually useful or entertaining in some way or another. Twitter becomes an adornment to other social bookmarking sites I visit – but that is the point – twitter has become a social bookmarking site from my experience. A bookmarking site with an awful lot of internet marketing at its core.

So, back to the changes at Facebook. A live stream of updates from your friends, including pictures, links, notes, fan pages, polls and whatever else I’ve missed. No, perhaps you don’t get the update when Lucy goes from ‘being in a relationship’ to ‘dumpville population 1′. But you still get the drunken updates when Lucy comes to grips with this fact, and lets be honest, those are far more interesting.

Its like twitter, but not, because its a live stream about your real life friends. The people you care about at the very least on a voyeuristic level, the people that aren’t going to be endlessly posting links to their personal blogs/online revenue generating attempts (unless all of your friends on facebook are internet marketers in which case kill yourself).

So I have joined the quickly diminishing percentile of the facebook populous that vote ‘YES’ to the facebook changes. For now at least, until the marketing takes over. Now I’m off to post this to my new favourite social bookmarking site :-) (just kidding reddit you still hold the number one spot).

Tagged as: facebook, twitter