a strange “status” of affairs;

I realised this morning that, with the exception of a quick update about the football on Sunday (posted because it had again struck me that it had been a while), I haven’t actually updated my Facebook status in about a week and certainly not since the roll-out of the social networking behemoth’s latest redesign. While I’m sure that this is a state of affairs which none of my contacts on the site have found particularly distressing as I was always a bit of an oversharer, it represents a pretty major shift in the way I use social media.

It hasn’t been an overnight shift, of course – it’s fair to say that Twitter fills the “microblogging” need that I was unconsciously using Facebook status updates for when that was the only option open to me. I’ve had a Twitter account since 2006, but only picked it up again when my boyfriend started using it the site became a bit more fashionable – these innovations are, of course, only as good as your audience. There was never any point using Twitter to share news when I was broadcasting to ten people, but now that I’m being followed by 300 it’s a worthwhile way to share links, commentary or little anecdotes from the back of the bus. Facebook, on the other hand, I’d rather reserve for more important announcements to be instantly broadcast to a wide range of “real life” friends, and family members.

I put this down to what I perceive as each site’s typical audience. Although seemingly never out of the news at the moment due to its status as the latest celebrity trend, most of the Twitter crowd seem to be early adopters: the techies, the net geeks, the dreaded “social media experts”. While Twitter is becoming much more fashionable, particularly here in the UK, it hasn’t reached the degree of ubiquity that profile-based sites such as Bebo and Facebook have. Your mum probably doesn’t have an account yet. You’re not likely to network with the people you went to highschool with.

Which is why I’ve never been keen on the integration of Facebook updates and tweets. I can see why synchronising the two is a great time-saving device, and helps you get your message quickly to two different audiences, but I think both sites call for a different style of content. Indeed, I’ll go a step further: I’d be happy to see updates I post to Facebook copied over to Twitter, mimicking the range of tools I use to broadcast when I’ve updated this blog, or to share my last.fm listening statistics. To me, Twitter encapsulates what that user is thinking, doing or linking to in that moment: it’s not a model that I think works well the other way around. It’s why I stopped using Twitter to update my Facebook status about ten minutes into trying out the service – basically I talk a lot of bollocks, frequently, and while it might be interesting to my fellow Tweeters as they see it stream by in real time it’s not interesting to my cousins, or my work colleagues, who aren’t constantly connected in the same way I am and who maybe check their Facebook profile once a week. I know that Facebook is jealously posessive of its data and such reverse integration isn’t currently possible, but I’m just putting it out there.

Why then Facebook’s redesign? Chris Willman at Huffington Post is one of many bloggers who have commented on the seeming “twitterfication” of the daddy of social networking websites. I’m not usually one to complain about a site redesign, but the new look makes very little sense to me. I don’t want to see a mess of data every time I log in – I like my neat status updates, which thankfully are still accessible in the same way on my phone. I want to see who’s breaking up, who’s having a baby, who’s changed their hair – all things I have been late to the party on in the last week because Facebook no longer lets me filter what content I want to see, when I want to see it. That day’s birthdays has been shifted someplace weird, in tiny font, and you might argue that if I have to be reminded when distant friends’ birthdays are so that I can write on their walls when I don’t really talk to them for the rest of the year I shouldn’t really be posting for those people anyway. I disagree, perhaps because I love to celebrate real-world connections no matter how tenuous. Or I’m just really, really nosey.

So why the change? Who asked for it? To quote Willman:

Earth to 24-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: As of last month, Twitter was getting 54 million monthly visits, which sounds impressive, except that this genius thing you invented was getting almost almost 1.2 billion visits–or, in other words, was still about 20 times as popular as the nascent challenger. Remind us again, Mark, what it was you didn’t like about that math?

[As an aside, and on the topic of integration which I managed to get away from, don't get me started on updating a blog with a daily aggregate of "tweets" posted, including conversations which passed twelve hours ago with people your blog readers don't interact with. Has anybody ever had any feedback or comments on the back of such posts, with the exception of maybe a new follower who didn't realise you were on Twitter as well? I'm not having a go - the concept genuinely boggles my mind and I'll happily agree to disagree if you find it worthwhile.]

When I first started using Twitter I thought it was utterly pointless, but that was before this new generation of plugins and tools to improve the whole experience. If I’m at a computer I use Twitterfox to post updates, which runs as a subtle pop-up at the bottom of my Firefox browser window. It’s become the easiest way to keep in touch with me if I’m busy or backlogged with my email, and it’s easy to jump in and out of the constant conversation even if it’s only just by checking recent posts and personal replies – and now I’m following over 200 users, I’ve abandoned the pretense of ever being able to keep up with everything ever posted. Which is fine, because as I said above Twitter as a tool is all about what’s happening now. These days it’s where I get my news from – spread and retweeted before it even hits the sites.

It does has its inconveniences though, particularly as it gains more media exposure. I seem to have ended up on some sort of “Twitter Elite” site which means I’m instantly recommended to anybody joining the site in the Glasgow area, which is nice in a way but it’s always strange to see somebody new who’s following maybe Stephen Fry, Alan Carr and Last Year’s Girl. I’m not sure how many of these people stick around when they realise I’m not a celebrity, and it’s fair to say I’ll follow back if there’s a decent amount of interaction – I’m a sucker for banter. No, the biggest pain in the backside is the marketers – I don’t mean the “WOW I GOT A FREE IPHONE CLICK HERE”-style spammers, who show up on every hot new site sooner or later, but rather the so-called “social media experts” who all seem to have about 4,000 followers apiece. Given I struggle to keep up with 200+ I’m not quite sure how that works, so I rarely give them the time of day. Plus, in their profile photos they all look like balding, middle-aged CEOs only in jeans and flannel shirts to show that they’re not the office type. I don’t want to take lessons in young, hip technology from somebody who looks like they could be my uncle, thanks.

Anyway, this is getting a bit long and keeping me away from the yummy dinner I’m having made for me tonight. The gist of it is: I love my blog. I quite like Twitter. I used to love Facebook. But they’re three very different sites which I use in very different ways, and on which I cater to very different audiences. You may disagree, and I suspect this post will either tank or pick up comments from people I’ve never even heard of given that Twitter is the hot topic of the moment. Personally I’d quite like to hear what you think.