Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Face to Facebook.

I guess I have to address my absence, but I warned you this would come. I appreciate everyone who has been eager for my next post, I just feel as though I dont want to cheat you by writing a half assed article, therefore if I am going to write I need to be motivated. Plus, with my grammar as bad as it already is that would make it like a quarter of and assed article.

Below is a response I wrote to one of my friends blogs, Click Here to read her post, and the below will make more sense. Feel free to contribute with your own thoughts as always, like I've said before if anything I dont just want this to be my thoughts.

In reply to Twitter-fied,

I enjoyed your article, I think you make some solid points, and thought that I might try to defend the other side a bit more.

First I'd like to say that I am currently not apart of the Twitter community, however I have considered several times about joining, but at the end of the day I end up deciding against each time. To me I see Twitter as more of a fad, as we have seen in the past with pogs, pocket pets, and beepers. I would say its most similar to the fad of the beeper, in that both forms of communication are very one demential which will eventually lead to its downfall.

With twitter you can only really express yourself in only 140 characteristics, to me thats just not enough. People dont just want sentence updates about your life. They want to see pictures, They want to know your opinions. They want to see who your dating, how you spent your weekend and what your views on life are. These are the elements that make Facebook superior to Twitter.

Another thing that will lead to Twitters failure is that they are never going to be able to get out of being compared to facebook. As a result of this relationship, twitter is going to fall into the trap of become more like facebook, losing its only uniqueness. Eventually, twitter is going to believe it will need to offer it customers more. Twitter gained a lot of its popularity though its ease to update through texting ability, but this is a feature that Facebook can easily and already can do.

I'll try to get back to the point of your article. I thought I would just back fill a bit with the difference between twitter and facebook.

Kelly, you talk a lot about getting away from real world communication, but you have to ask yourself would that communication exist if Facebook wasn't there? No one would disagree with you that nothing compares to real face to face contact, but what do you do when that isnt an option.

A lot of this issue comes down to time. While I would agree that I waste my share of time on facebook. I dont have the time to have conversation to give updates to all of my friends across the world, and I think that facebook makes for a good substitute to that. Personally, I consider myself blessed if my schedule and my best friends schedule works out well enough to have a 15 minute phone conversation.

If anything, I think its brings us closer, I am able to share the beautiful sunset I saw in the morning on the way to work with people that live 300+ miles away from me, or tell them how I feel about a concert I saw the other evening. In a way it is a giant scrapbook of my life, that I dont want to lose. Just a few weeks ago I was able to use facebook to catch my friend up on the 6 months she missed while she was away in Asia, which without it I would just have stories, but through facebook it brought those six months to life.

8 comments:

  1. Might want to link back to the post you replied to: http://www.makeadiff21.com/technology/2009/4/29/twitter-fied.html

    ;)

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  2. what was confusing about click here to read her post.

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  3. sorry. insert foot into mouth... i posted that as i scrolled through before i read - expected it to stand out. my apologies:)

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  4. okay here are my thoughts -- and i think it must be said that i just got involved in facebook as you know -- i think you also know why i've stayed away from it and have been skeptical of it -- i think that you BOTH make very good points -- i find myself agreeing with many of the points that you make, and to be honest, if i hadn't just gotten an account, i would have never even considered your side on this -- but since i have gotten an account, i have been in consistent contact with people i haven't spoken to in 20 years -- and that's pretty darn cool, if you ask me - sure, i could email them or call them, no doubt... but i don't know that i would have been able to find them SO EASILY --

    good discourse, that's for sure...

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  5. i forgot to mention that i did get a twitter account last week -- truly, nothing has frustrated more (technologically) in the past year or two -- i got no support from them whatsoever and while i still have the account, i have no intentions of ever using it again...

    and you may find this to be interesting...

    http://www.theweek.com/article/index/95954/The_significance_of_Twitter_quitters

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  6. i want to thank you for posting such a great response to kelly's article on my website. her insight was amazing and i completely agree with what both of you said. while all the technology is pretty cool, we still need to remember the importance of face-to-face contact, as well as not allowing too many distractions to keep us from just living life. :o)

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  7. where's my response yo, and twitter is micro-fame thats why everyone is into it. It feels like people are listening even if they aren't.

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  8. i disagree. twitter is just text messaging through a web medium. with smart phones, it gets even better. it also makes it easier to multicast, meaning send a message out and have lots of people see it. there are several very useful uses of it. i can get short, quick updates on lots of things, my favorite being penguins games. i also follow tech leaders twitter accounts where they often post links to their articles and other things they're reading.

    twitter isn't supposed to replace facebook. however, if yahoo bought twitter and combined it with Flikr, i think facebook would not be happy. twitter isn't social networking, it's just quick conversation.

    it's actually very interesting to see interviews done on it. especially with politicians. limit them to 140 chars and they can't dance around questions easily.

    try it out and don't think of it as a replacement to facebook. i think you'll be surprised.

    my twitter name is lenz1105. send something my way with @lenz1105.

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