Communication vs. Vanity: The Difference Between Twitter and Facebook

It took me awhile to warm up to Twitter after I joined it back in January of 2009. It wasn't until that May that I realized I could turn on text message notifications on my phone and use it to stay up to date with E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Expo, gaming's big showcase of the year) news while I was at work. Once I was hooked on having tweets sent straight to my phone for me to read, I knew the next step was to make actual connections with people. I was only following a bunch of game journalists and celebrities at that point, and I wanted people who would actually talk to me. I added a bunch of like-minded gamers to my feed and soon we'd sparked up friendships while responding to each other's messages.

Facebook seemed to offer all of these opportunities and more. Your messages stayed visible for longer, and when people responded they had more room to say what they wanted to say. I started posting my odd thoughts and jokes throughout the day, hoping they might strike up a conversation. The most I ever got was a "like" or two. To me, there is a fundamental disconnect between the users of Twitter and the users of Facebook, and that is the idea of communication.

You might think that by limiting what you can say to 140 characters, Twitter has severely hampered their user's ability to discuss things and relate to each other. Surprisingly I've never found that to be the case. Instead, it opens things up to more of a back and forth conversation. People being forced to limit themselves means they can't go off on a long diatribe that is impossible to respond to. It's more like an actual conversation between people in real life, with opportunities for others to jump in.

When you post something on Facebook, it's like you're posting a video on YouTube. The comments that people leave are treated exactly like that; comments. The idea is that you share part of yourself, something you've thought, or a weird/funny thing you came across that day, and people either "like" or comment on it. It's not about opening a means of communication, it's a form of vanity. You put something up and you smile when you see how many people enjoyed it enough to respond in some way. If someone tries to discuss what you've put out there, they are much more likely to say everything they want to say in one comment, meaning even if you respond to that comment they are much less likely to reply again.

I'm probably biased by this point, but this is how I see Twitter and Facebook. I have made countless friendships using Twitter, and I have done nothing more with Facebook but awkwardly extend high school relationships that should probably have died long ago.

A few weeks ago a college professor of a game design class was telling his students about using Twitter to network and make new connections in the game industry. He secretly tweeted for anyone involved in video games to say "Hi" to his class using the hashtag #ims211. His relatively small number of followers retweeted it and then their followers in turn retweeted it and before the end of the day it had exploded. Pretty much every person even remotely working in a field involving video games had responded to the hashtags. Developers, CEOs of companies, journalists, amatuer bloggers, community managers, PR representatives, artists, and likely more had all jumped on board. (The whole story).

After that the hashtag took on a life of its own, becoming a means of connecting a mass of gamers. Some people used it to find new people in the game industry to follow, while others turned it into a kind of chat room for people who enjoyed games and wanted to talk about them. The entire thing just helped to prove how great Twitter can be at bringing people together and forming new friendships. That sort of thing just doesn't really seem to happen on Facebook, or at least I haven't heard of it happening. I've only heard my sister-in-law's intentions to go grocery shopping. I suppose I could go start-up a conversation about that.