My phone rang the other day and a desperate voice was on the other end.
"Dude, how do I get my Twitter feed off my Facebook? It's pissing off everyone."
"Well, yeah man. If people wanted to see your Tweets, they'd just follow you on Twitter."
"But everyone is saying how great Twitter is, and Facebook is trying to be more like Twitter, so I thought it would be a good idea."
"Look at your profile page, you've been tweeting your ass off all day, and filling up your friends home page with your tweets. That's all they see is you dropping tinyURL links to "10 Best Twitter whatever..."
" Yeah, it's just like Twitter."
"Uh, no. It isn't."
With all the Twitter hype and the recent changes at Facebook, a lot of people are in flux when it comes to their social media usage. People are migrating to Twitter in record numbers and with that comes lots of "experts" that want to talk to those people and dispense their advice. One bit of exceptionally bad advice I've seen is to add an RSS feed of your Twitter account to your FaceBook profile. For a very casual Twitter user like myself, it probably wouldn't be so intrusive on Facebook if I added the 5 or so "tweets" that I make a day, but tweeting can be a little addictive at times. I've used Twitter with blip.fm to bookmark music I like and in one night, tweeted nothing but songs from blip.fm, one after another, till I had 50 bookmarked . Great for me because I have a base of some sweet tunes to choose from while I'm tweeting in the future, absolutely terrible for my Facebook friends if I had an RSS feed of them to Facebook because they would see nothing but updates from my tweets on their Home page.
Twitter is great for many things, but connecting on a personal level isn't one. Limiting one to 140 characters doesn't exactly allow someone to express themselves in detail. That's where Facebook should come into play, but if you essentially turn your Facebook profile into a Twitter feed, you've just distanced yourself from your Facebook friends a little more. The vast majority of people on Facebook are casual social media users and aren't online all day communicating with people. Judging by the backlash against Facebook for it's recent Twitter style changes, many people prefer the more personal look of the "Old Facebook" and are threatening to leave and (gasps) go back to MySpace. Personally, I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a spork than sit and wait for some people's MySpace pages (filled with embedded code) to load, but I digress.
Both Twitter and Facebook are great independent of each other. Together, they dont mix well. Just imagine if you had the ability to automatically spam join requests to "Mob Wars" on Twitter. Do you think that would enrich anyone's social media experience any? Well, it's not that abstract a thought if you listen to all the people that extoll the virtues of integration. It may save you a little time, but it will cost you so much more in the long run. But whatever you do, don't go back to MySpace, please?
