LIVEdigitally

About a week ago I decided to hook my twitter stream up to my facebook status updates. I figured it’d be an easy way to get the same messages out to more people, and with more places for conversation/interactivity.  But I pretty much completely forgot about the following attributes of my Tweets™:

• Much of the time I am “re-tweeting”, passing along something someone else says, typically in an effort to seem cool or more knowledgeable than I am.
• Many of my other tweets are responses to tweets, which inherently include virtually no context whatsoever about the conversation when shown in isolation on Facebook.
• Often I tweet about new blog posts, which are automatically included in my Facebook content stream.

Here’s a snapshot:

This leaves about 2% of my actual tweets as “interesting content” (at best).  They look more like this:

Now on twitter, the whole concept that many of a user’s tweets are uninteresting to many of their followers is, for the most part, irrelevant.  Few-to-none of a twitterer’s followers are real-world friends, and there are so many other tweets flying by, the majority of Twitter users do not see the majority of tweets from the people they follow. And in the twitterverse, that’s just plain twitterfabulous!

But in Facebook it’s not.  By and large, the vast majority of Facebook users (in other words – people who use Facebook and don’t live in the SF Bay Area) are friends with people they know from real-life.  They rarely boast about quantity of Facebook friends because it’s mostly meaningless.  As a result, while a tremendous amount of content is still lost in the stream, the majority of Facebook users see much of the content from their friends.

Further, since these are more likely to be people we encounter in a medium beyond Facebook, we are discouraged from sharing, for lack of a better word, crap.  And hence, my crapstream will be discontinued from boring my friends on Facebook.  Sorry about that.  I’ll go back to boring you through other updates.