Why I prefer Twitter to Facebook
Twitter and Facebook have some similarities. Both offer a micro-blogging feature via status updates.
Of the two, I think I prefer Twitter.
Why Twitter’s better
Twitter’s public. You don’t need a logon to see my Twitter feed. (It can also be made private, if one prefers.)
Twitter’s open. You don’t need to log onto a web site to use it. Thanks to a published API, Twitter has lots of different applications that can post to it, and you can also post via text message.
Twitter displays things in strict time order. Facebook’s News Feed does some weird crap with what it shows you, sometimes sometimes (and often annoyingly) showing you stuff from days ago, and seemingly hiding other updates until it feels like showing them. Which leads me into…
Twitter keeps its history, and it’s very visible. You can link straight back to that killer post. Facebook… well, I’m not sure I trust it to keep everything, because I can’t easily find it. (But given there’s always an inherent risk with keeping your data with external companies, I keep copies of significant posts myself.)
No offence to my Facebook friends, but Twitter has cooler people on it, publicly tweeting. In most cases you don’t need to go through the rigmarole of getting permission to watch their Tweets, so it’s easier to find and follow who you want. In fact it’s helped get me interested in Federal politics again.
Twitter doesn’t try to integrate every bloody app, and keep asking you for permissions to use them. Nor does it have overt advertising or keep making suggestions about things that will just waste your time.
Why Facebook’s better
Facebook has the advantage of including easier methods for posting pictures and video. Twitter gets these via addon sites such as Twitpic, or via separate services such as Flickr or Youtube.
You never see this in Facebook:
You can’t play Scrabble in Twitter. Mind you, those new adverts are pretty annoying.
How others see you
Facebook has the Like button. Twitter has a way to make a Tweet your favourite, though that’s not really an equivalent to Like.
But Twitter also has Retweets, allowing people to pass on your comments to their followers, should they wish. Facebook doesn’t really have an equivalent to that.
And Twitter has Lists, which I find interesting.
How do others categorise me? Checking the lists, I show up as:
- everythingaussie
- random-goings-on
- state
- melbourne (x 7)
- aunewsnotsportnottech
- people
- railpage
- irl
- news (x 2)
- faves
- openstreetmap
- people-of-interest
- real-people
- local-news-sport
- favs
- melbourne1
- auspolitics
- geeky
Hmm.
So anyway, I’m more likely to post on Twitter than FB. Follow my Twitter feed if you want to.
(I should add that although I dip into Facebook every so often, I am pretty strict there about only “friending” people I actually know in real life.)
Which do you prefer?
Tags: Facebook, Twitter
9 comments
Do not like (or dislike)
Have disabled the “Like” comments feature, after previously trying it with Like/Dislike, then disabling Dislike. Few were using it; bit of a waste of time for a site like this I suspect.
Like or dislike a comment? Leave an actual response instead!
Tags: blog
7 comments
Ancient political history
Trivia for you: Back in prehistoric times, when most of you had never heard of the Internet and barely anybody used the Web, and way before Twitter and Facebook, I blogged the 1996 Federal election campaign.
Several times a week I’d add something new, including a spoof leader debate transcript, a Hippy Party manifesto, Ron And Jeff on voting, and advice on what to tell How To Vote hander-outers when you don’t want one.
It went almost-unnoticed because so few people were online at the time, but it did get a write-up in The West Australian (sorry it’s fuzzy; I’ll try to find a better scan):
Tags: Internet, politics, Toxic Custard
Comments Off
Rating comments
A day off today. Rather clear out junk from the house, I’ve tried installing a comments rating system.
If you like a comment, you can click the green Thumbs Up; if you dislike it, you can click the red Thumbs Down.
Looks like it won’t let you vote on a comment posted from the same IP address you’re at.
Feedback welcome.
(For more about comments on this blog, see the comment rules)
Update 23/7/2010: It didn’t really work out.
Tags: blog, comments
12 comments
Hold that thought
Working on the server. If you have a comment, hold that thought.
Update 3:40pm. OK, that was easy. WordPress upgraded, and switched to a different server. Re-delegating now… if you can see this message, it’s worked.
Tags:
1 comment
Reference works part 2
In 2007, a week or so after Kevin Rudd became PM, I took a look at a bunch of online reference works, some free, some corporate, to see how many had updated their articles on Australia.
The score was 2/5 getting it right, with Wikipedia and Britannica having been updated, and Citizendium, Encyclopedia.com and CIA World Fact Book having not been.
It’s been a week since Julia Gillard became PM. How do they stack up this time?
- CIA World Factbook — head of government: Prime Minister Kevin RUDD (since 3 December 2007); Deputy Prime Minister Julia GILLARD (since 3 December 2007)
- Citizendium — Australia’s head of government is Prime Minister Julia Gillard of the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
- Wikipedia — Following a partyroom leadership challenge, Julia Gillard became the first female Prime Minister in June 2010.
- Britannica — You have to scroll down a long way to find the Prime Ministers list, but: Julia Gillard 2010-
- Encyclopedia.com — The default result is from the Columbia Encyclopedia, 2008, and it’s not clear if it’s been edited since then. Parliamentary elections in Nov., 2007, brought the Labor party into office; party leader Kevin Rudd , a former diplomat, became prime minister.
So a better result this time around, with 3/5 correct, and Britannica Citizendium coming into the fold of having updated their information relatively quickly.
And as always, rather than relying solely on any of these, one should always seek a secondary source for important information.
The timewaster
The curse of the Internet and the short attention span — there’s too much stuff to look at.
So I check my email.
Then I have a look in Google Reader.
What’s Twitter doing? Okay.
Facebook? My turn in Scrabble yet?
Might check a couple of the news sites and see what’s happening.
And the Whirlpool forum?
OK, all under control. But hey, I wonder if there’s any new email?
Rinse and repeat. How do I break this cycle?
I once had an idea for it: a combined mega-reader/aggregator that would grab data from all those sources and more, configured by the user. It would rank everything according to a priority — again, configured by the user — perhaps the emails from your boss and/or spouse at the top, the dull email newsletter which you should read but don’t want to at the bottom, and news bulletins somewhere in the middle.
So you could see everything in one hit, all prioritised.
I even came up with a name and a domain name for it: View My World.
And I did some rough designs on it, but never got to the coding stage.
I still think it’s a good idea, and anybody who’s got the time and inclination to work on it should give me a shout, maybe we can come up with a collaboration.
Meanwhile, amusingly, ViewMyWorld.com is now registered by Microsoft, and appears to be a recruitment web site.
(Anybody who wants to develop the Screaming Room idea should also give me a scream shout. I already have a prospective subscriber in Derrimut.)
Tags: email, Facebook, Google, Internet, shouting room, Whirlpool
9 comments
ISP shopping part 2
An update on my ISP shopping post from a couple of weeks ago:
Netspace rang me up to discuss my concerns (they found the post themselves), and to let me know there was some progress on resolving them:
Advice of network outages — they said there is already a project underway to advise of outages via SMS direct to customers. Sounds pretty good. Whether or not they’d open up their network status page was unclear — sounds like not. But at least SMS alerts would make it easy to know what’s going on without being online.
Revision of plans without telling anybody — apparently this is being discussed with Netspace management, and it is recognised that this isn’t great customer service. No promises, but at least they’re looking at it.
And they said that they recognised I was a loyal customer (since about 2003 I think), and wanted to keep me, and made me a very good offer to upgrade me. Combined with the fact that there’d be no hassles with switching ISPs, and no outage, it was an offer to good to refuse.
So I’ve upgraded and am sticking with Netspace, on a 75 Gb plan (30 Gb peak, 45 Gb off-peak; about double what I had before) for $59.95/month (the same as I was paying before).
So far it’s been good, the speed difference is noticeable. In fact, they switched me to the faster speed before the modem arrived, so almost instantly my speed went up from 1500 kbps to about 8000 kbps (the fastest possible ADSL1 speed). And the ADSL2+ speed is about double that.
And of course because there’s no contract, I can jump ship anytime if I want (though in the fine print there is a $65 “network termination fee”). But for now, I’m happy again, and provided Netspace are true to their word and fix the outage notifications, I’m more than happy to recommend them.
Another lesson here: I’m not sure if this is universal, but it would seem that people on ADSL1, using ADSL1 modems, are able to get a speed upgrade from 1500 kbps to 8000 kbps fairly painlessly just by switching to an ADSL2+ plan. Because for many ISPs, ADSL1 uses others’ facilities (eg it’s reselling) and ADSL uses their own, the pricing is likely to be comparable — in my case it was identical. In fact, why Netspace (and other ISPs) don’t encourage this?
Tags: ISPs, Netspace
5 comments
