The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

A friend of mine, Daniel Brusilovsky, wrote a piece for TechCrunch yesterday called Why Teens Aren’t Using Twitter. And while it’s definitely a well-written post, a good read, and I’m sure the facts about teens being a relatively small number when it comes to Twitter, I personally fall on a different side of the aisle.

Daniel spends a good portion of his post comparing teens’ opinions on Twitter to those of Facebook and MySpace. And granted, there is no dispute that those sites (mainly Facebook, these days) are more popular in the eyes of high school/college-aged teens. But I just don’t fit in the same category. Facebook still feels very foreign to me when I try to use it, yet Twitter is something I practically can’t live without these days, and I’ve been Twittering for two and a half years now. Heck, I now consider my tweets equal in importance to my blog posts, which is why they get equal billing on the home page of my new site. So in response to Daniel’s article, I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss why I am using Twitter and prefer it over the more traditional social networking sites.

Here’s what Daniel wrote in comparing Facebook and Twitter:

Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other. The way my friends and I see it, Facebook is a closed network. It’s a network of people and friends that you trust to be connected to, and to share information like your email address, AIM screen name, and phone number. You know who’s getting your status messages, because you either approved or added each person to your network.

With Twitter, it’s the exact opposite. Anyone can follow your status updates. It’s a completely open network that makes teenagers feel “unsafe” about posting their content there, because who knows who will read it. Sure, you get emails notifying you when you have new followers, but that doesn’t compare to the level of detail you get when someone on Facebook adds you, and you get their information.

Everything that Daniel wrote is completely correct. Yet I prefer Twitter over Facebook for some of those very reasons, and a lot of it is based on the way that I prefer to communicate online.

Part of the reason my comfortableness on Facebook is different than Twitter is because of the differences in who the people that become part of my network “are.” I’ve got 184 friends on Facebook. I only follow 22 people on Twitter. I will be honest: I don’t actually know who a lot of my Facebook friends are (or at the very least I don’t know them that well), and a good number of them are people that I’ve met at school, or who at least say are in my high school’s network (usually if I don’t know them, I go by the “friend of a friend” montra–I’ll add them if they are mutual friends with a significant number of my current friends). Ugh, did that make much sense? Then they end up treating their Facebook status updates virtually the same as Twitter,and that’s the first thing I see when I log in. Most of which is stuff I don’t care about, a lot of it contains comments that are somewhat inappropriate that I certainly don’t want to see.

And Facebook adds so much more to make it quite a bit cluttered. In addition to sorting through friend requests every so often, I also have to sort through event invitations, group invitations (so some pretty weird groups, pretty much the only one I actually joined was “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet”), and creepy things like superpokes and werewolfs. Facebook just has a lot of creepy stuff that people turn on that also invades my part of the neighborhood (long enough for me to click the Ignore button), and all it does is make me want to use Facebook less. Hence why I only log in once every two weeks or so, unless I’ve got an important reason for being there.

Twitter, on the other hand, honestly provides me with a lot more control over my experience. Unlike Facebook, where you can install everything including the kitchen sink to your experience, Twitter is centrally a 140-character-or-less microblogging service. The focus is on the messages (tweets) that I want to write. Unlike Facebook, where the only way someone can see more about you and what you’re doing is for you to add them as a friend right back (which is part of the reason why I have 184 friends on Facebook), Twitter is one-way. Unless you choose to make your tweets private, anyone who wants to can follow you, and you don’t have to worry about it (Twitter will send you an e-mail to let you know unless you turn that e-mail off, like I have).

Yes, Twitter is open. And some people may not like that about Twitter, and will prefer Facebook for that reason. My response? I’ve been doing personal blogging since 2005, for over four years. And that’s obviously a communication medium that’s wide open. I pretty much consider Twitter to be an extension of my blog. Back before Twitter was a hit, WordPress users were big on this thing called “Asides”–special blog posts that were just short snippets as opposed to big long posts like this one. Asides have kind of disappeared now as Twitter and blog integrations with Twitter have taken over, and that’s why I give Twitter equal billing on my home page now, as I have already mentioned. And I’ve got 206 people who follow my tweets on Twitter. I don’t know who they are, I don’t know why they’re bothering to follow me, and quite frankly (unlike a number of tweeters out there), I don’t care. I write both my blog and my tweets to express myself when I’m inspired to do so, not to make the readers happy. And I only follow 22 tweeters, because currently, that’s all that I really care to see when Twitterrific pops up on the right side of my window. If I start to get bored or annoyed when a particular person’s tweets show up in my Twitterrific window, I stop following them. Don’t ask me about the folks who follow hundreds or thousands of other tweeters live with it, I have a fun enough time keeping up with my 22.

Daniel also says some more on why teens wouldn’t want to use Twitter:

Twitter is also seen as more expensive to keep up with than Facebook. Most of my friends spend their time playing video games, watching TV, surfing online, and text messaging to actual friends who you know will reply back. In an economy like this, most parents don’t want to spend the extra money on unlimited texting to total strangers. So why spend money on sending SMS updates to Twitter, when you can send updates to someone you know will read it and reply?

This is probably his weakest argument, because it focuses on only one way to use Twitter. Sure, when Twitter started, tweeting really came down to either visiting Twitter.com or using SMS messaging. Well, you know what? I’ve been tweeting for two and a half years, I’m just about to cross 6,000 tweets, and I’ve never made a single tweet with SMS yet. (I might do it for the first time next week when I have to coordinate a meetup location with other folks.) And that’s because I don’t obsess with keeping the eternal “What are you doing?” question answered. I don’t know about you, but I often have internal thoughts that I just want to express to nobody in particular, and Twitter offers me a great way to do it.

Take a look at some of my tweets that I’ve marked as my favorites:

• There is one thing that I think is indisputable: Antonio Vivaldi was a genius. 7/12/09
• Reason #1 why media companies should embrace YouTube: Most of my iTunes purchases these days are BECAUSE I found them on YouTube. 7/9/09
• YouTube video comments. A collection of writings that will go down as the most embarrassing set of words ever attributed to the human race. 5/31/09
• I’ve got a song in my heart and music in my head. Oh wait, the latter is because I’m wearing headphones. Duh. 4/3/09
• “Are you goin’ to Macworld SF? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Remember me to one who speaks there, he once was a true love of mine…” 1/6/09
• I’m a money launderer. I just found two $1 bills that I put in the washing machine by mistake. :/ 12/14/08
• For me, tweeting isn’t just saying what I’m doing. Tweets come about by instinct, inspiration, with a small dab of boredom mixed in. 5/12/08

Not to sound too self-praising, but those are noteworthy remarks or moments for me. Who would I text them to? Who would care if I said or wrote them to someone? Why would I blog them, when such a short context-free blog posts would seem weird and the process of getting a full blog post posted takes time and is not immediately available at my beck and call the way Twitter is? I don’t care who sees it (and I’m usually self-disciplined enough that anything that is particularly private for me does not find its way onto my blog or my tweets), but looking back on them continues to be enjoyable, just as looking back at some of my old blog posts continues to be enjoyable.

That’s why I am using Twitter. But then why am I using Facebook?

I first signed up for Facebook two years ago. I didn’t really know what it was or anything, but that was right after Facebook had launched its API for applications and everyone was talking about it, so I signed up. And then my classmates started flocking to me. But it has been useful. I have been able to use its chatting platform to chat with friends that I can’t find on Twitter, or IM, or anywhere else. I’ve been able to find out about missed assignments from classmates, and there was even one project this past year where we worked together on it via a Facebook group. Thanks to its ability to tag faces in photos, I’ve been able to find photos of myself from Macbeth or from my graduation (and from there to see other photos taken from those events) that I otherwise wouldn’t have stumbled upon. And now that I’m headed to a brand new place, and likely won’t see many of my friends from school again anytime soon, it will probably prove to be a nice tool to reestablish old acquaintances. And for now, I have a Twitter app installed on there which makes my Facebook status messages reflect my tweets (and of course, then I get Facebook friends commenting on them, and often kind of missing the point, but oh well). And who knows, things can always evolve; who knows what I’ll be using when summer of 2010 or 2011 rolls around.

I don’t see Twitter and Facebook as mutually exclusive; I primarily use them for different purposes, and aimed at different audiences. I will say that people who are successful on Twitter, like people who are successful at blogging, need to be a bit more mature and proficient at writing to a general audience than many of the people who post on Facebook. And while I would love to see teens embrace blogging, tweeting, and more creative and productive means of self-expression like that (and perhaps a note to teachers that they should start embracing these as a way to improve writing skills among teens, hint hint), it seems that at least for now, the majority of teens will prefer the video games over the keyboard.

Fortunately, there are exceptions to every rule. And I’m one of them.