Friday 23 October 2009

In two minds

I'm in a bit of a quandary about Facebook and Twitter. Up until now I've been using Facebook mostly for social stuff and Twitter for slightly more serious work-related thoughts. Occasionally they've overlapped or I've used Twitter to say something that just occurred to me but generally Twitter seems more suited to the quick comment than Facebook.

Lots of people, though, do use Facebook status messages very much like Twitter and I get streams of odd thoughts, outbursts, comments and rants changing the home page every few minutes. The people I like to communicate with are also spaced out across the two so Facebook friends miss my tweets and vice versa.

Perhaps I'm not so much mad (previous article!) but schizophrenic now, displaying one character in one place and another in the other! So I've decided to join the two which means my poor Facebook friends will now see their home pages scrolling down even more quickly as my tweets get added and what was once a weekly status change could turn into several times a day or more as the mood takes me. There's always the Remove button so I shall not feel too bad.

I divided the two initially when I noticed that a colleague tended to send tweets every few minutes from various conferences she attended. She had the two accounts linked so I was getting everything twice and some days the whole of my Facebook home page was occupied with copies of tweets I'd already seen and wasn't really wanting to see again. I didn't really want to annoy or bore non-work Facebook friends with my tweets so stopped Facebook collecting them. I don't seem to have got into that tweet-a-minute gossip mode, though, so, hopefully the increased status changes won't now be too much of a nuisance to Facebook friends.

Something else I noticed about my behaviour was that I tended to think before changing my Facebook status - not so much about what I was writing but who would be likely to read it. Tweets didn't matter - they seemed more transient (although I am aware that Google can now locate and publish them!) - and the likelihood of actually seeing any of my followers other than a couple of people was almost non-existent. I quite liked that laissez-faire approach (and also got the message out much more quickly) so my Facebook friends will be seeing more of that now.

Until I decide that I prefer schizophrenia again.

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