I am not underestimating Facebook. I have said in other posts that they are to be feared. Not because they are innovative, but because they now have almost 200 million users. Twitter has something around 5 million. That is a significant difference, and that many users can really change the game. This is the same reason that Yahoo is still in the game. Their content properties are some of the most visited on the web.

If Google’s not careful, Facebook may slip in behind the scenes and buy them out (yes, I know that’s kind of ludicrous, but let’s check back again in five years and see.)

And I’m not really searching for anything on Facebook… I can see where maybe if I wanted to dig through someone’s profile for a link I may have posted a year ago or something it would be nice, but its not a damnable offense that it doesn’t exist.

Consider this as an example… I have an issue with my motorcycle. If I post a question as a status update on Facebook, the typical responses would be friends offering to help out with rides I may need or something of that nature, maybe one or two who own bikes also could chime in how to fix it or offer to come over and help troubleshoot it. If I post the same question to one of the forums I’m a member of which specialize in motorcycles, I’m going to get qualified answers for helping troubleshoot from people that are likely more knowledgeable than myself, or at least am open to listening to. If I post that as a question on Twitter, how do I even begin to qualify someone’s knowledge??

Its purely a matter of how much valuable feedback I want, and Twitter is to information as the bottom-line on ESPN is to sports…. its there, and once in a while you may see a score thats interesting or unexpected… but its only a microcosm of what happened. It doesn’t tell the whole story.

And its in that loss of real value, coupled with the unqualified people contributing that causes me to just not be a fan of the platform.

Twitter is difficult for a lot of people. For many, the question becomes how to use it. With many followers (even over a few hundred), there is a lot of information flowing by. As twitter gains more mainstream adoption, we will probably see more tools that deal with the issues in Twitter. Groups are one way, but I would not be surprised if someone came up with something novel.

It is not so much a matter of how people use facebook. There are a ton of people on facebook, and the search capabilities just do not compare to twitter or friendfeed. If you are allowing people to update status, share news or blog posts and various things like that, search becomes a very important feature.

http://manofmanywords.blogspot.com/2009/01/twitter-sucks-is-inferior-to-blog.html

You’ll laugh, maybe. After I wrote the post, however, some cool people made some other cool people follow me, in an attempt to win me back into the Twitter fold.

It worked. I’m sold on Twitter again. It’s led to clients for me, and I’ve been able to help people out too.

Facebook, and even Myspace, I share things with the 100 or so people I truly in life know and am real friends with.

Discussion forums and boards I feel like while I may not know the people on a personal level, theres continuing dialog on multiple subjects. We learn more about each other, tendencies, preferences, likes and dislikes. Theres ongoing conversation about a particular set of subjects, that maybe most of my friends on or off Facebook don’t share that interest in.

I ‘m starting to see Twitter as a really really really shallow way of communicating. Maybe I’m misguided, but whats the value of earning followers if you really don’t know anything about them other than one sentence at a time format? The average length of time any one comment is on a user’s front page is 5 minutes. Who is reading a full day’s worth of logs at that rate if you have over 100 followers, let alone thousands?