Monday, October 11, 2010

Social Obligation

Facebook and Twitter are different.  And there's a reason that we like one over the other.  Facebook has a built in social obligation.  Relationships are immediately reciprocated.  There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.  The advantages are that it becomes much more personal, and truly makes sense for those real world relationships.  Disadvantages are that it often becomes noisy and your news stream isn't always interesting to you.  Sure, you can individually hide people, but that is a nuisance and time consuming.

Twitter has an alternative method.  It has received criticism for being an anti-social network as opposed to a social one.  This allows you to pick the people that are interesting to you and not be bogged down by noise.  There is no pressure to follow everyone who follows you, but results in many people having relatively few follower counts.

It all depends what you want.  I'll sacrifice some social for some relevance.