Yostivanich

Which do you care about more sim­ply get­ting a stream of con­ciu­si­cous thoughts from peo­ple or a stream of tons of dif­fer­ent aspects on that per­son and lots of infor­ma­tion to put it into con­text. That’s the dilemma fac­ing peo­ple sign­ing up for social net­works. Each spe­cial­izes in an area that makes it use­ful to the end users.

Face­book excels at pro­vid­ing you with tons of infor­ma­tion on your friends and let­ting you keep in touch with them very eas­ily. It lets you have a social dia­logue with some­one who you may never see, but you can find out their favorite movies, music, where they live, chal­lenge them to a game of Scrab­ble and so much more.

Facebook’s News Feed

That’s a close and per­sonal friend­ship taken to the online world, Twit­ter is much the oppo­site. You don’t really have a lot of infor­ma­tion on the per­son, instead you get a stream of thoughts (140 char­ac­ters at a time) that let you see what the per­son is think­ing at a bunch of dif­fer­ent times.

Twit­ter Stream

Face­book is uniquely use­ful to me at pro­vid­ing con­nec­tions to my real life friends and fam­ily. Let­ting me tell them how I am doing, and find out what they are out to, pas­sively putting infor­ma­tion onto Face­book. I can fol­low peo­ple and get to know them closer and keep friend­ships that in the past would have just died due to the dif­fi­culty of communication.

I use Twit­ter for a vastly dif­fer­ent pur­pose, to fol­low a large group of peo­ple, who most may not even know me but whose thoughts I am inter­ested in hear­ing. Peo­ple who express some ideas or infor­ma­tion that I want to hear more of, or even those who just cre­ate great art. I can fol­low along not just them cre­at­ing new ideas and art, but see when they go out to eat or what they think of a new movie. It’s a very weird world where I find out before the papers are even allowed to pub­lish the reviews what the first peo­ple watch­ing a movie think.

That’s what com­mu­ni­ca­tion will look like tomor­row and I intend to be on the cut­ting edge and learn­ing as much as I can.

Fol­low me on Twit­ter.

Flickr pho­tos cour­tesy of: pseudo­placebo and pre­masagar