Stopping Twitter Updates on Facebook

by Jamie Thingelstad on January 14, 2009

If you are a friend of mine on Facebook you are going to see a lot fewer updates from me going forward. I’ve decided to no longer send Twitter updates to my Facebook profile.

I was having a great lunch with my friend Jim Bernard and he had mentioned that he had severed the Twitter-Facebook bridge and I was curious. He explained to me his reasoning and much of it rung true to me. I also reflected on feedback I got from people that I know on Facebook and they were commenting that I updated a lot, usually with a note of annoyance. The reality was I used Twitter a decent amount, and I never do Facebook updates.

Twitter was one of the early applications deployed when Facebook opened up their platform to third parties. I quickly added it and never thought much about it. Plus, at that time, the people I had connections with on Facebook were largely the same people that I had connections with on Twitter. So it seemed to make sense to just mirror things.

That has changed a lot. Facebook is a very different community than Twitter. There is a lot less overlap between my social network on Facebook than Twitter. Twitter users expect a different volume of updates, and have a wider range of context for those updates. Lastly, sending a lot of Tweets to Facebook just creates a lot of noise. The two systems have different cultures: Twitter is a hot tub, Facebook is a high school reunion.

If you want to still get my Twitter updates, you can follow me on Twitter. If we aren’t friends on Facebook, check out my profile page. I will continue to syndicate my blog posts to my Facebook profile.

Tagged as: Facebook, Jim Bernard, Twitter

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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }

Adam Sellke January 14, 2009 at 11:04 pm

Points well taken. Different cultures aside, tweets as Facebook status updates have always been a little odd because they so often seem (and are) out of context.

Nevertheless I feel compelled to keep a “pulse” on Facebook, as I so infrequently am on Facebook.

The benefit of sticking with this approach is that often my Twitter-originated updates will solicit responses from my Facebook friends and draw me back there to touch base.

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Jamie Thingelstad January 16, 2009 at 6:46 am: I thought the same thing Adam, and that was the main reason I was doing the syndication, to make my Facebook profile seem more “alive”. However, I didn’t like the unintended consequence that this “talking at” instead of “talking with” resulted in.

Notably, I would find that people had left Facebook comments to a syndicated message from Twitter that I would never see. People were under the assumption that I was engaged when I wasn’t and I think left some wondering why I wasn’t engaging with them in comments. :-\

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Ira Mitchell January 15, 2009 at 9:30 am

I’m with Sellke on this one. I almost never go to Facebook on my own, and maybe because I Twitter at a slower pace than you it hasn’t been an issue with my “friends”. I get plenty of comments back that give me an easy click to respond.

I have heard from one of my wife’s friends that my Facebook Updates “don’t make sense” very often. to that I say, “they do to me.”

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Bill Heyman January 15, 2009 at 9:52 pm

I did the same thing several months ago, which I realized that my Facebook friends generally didn’t care about the geeky/techie stuff I put in my tweets. So, now I update my status differently and for different purposes in each of Twitter and Facebook. I do use Friendfeed with Facebook Friendfeed integration, which puts my tweets in my Facebook news feed. On occasion, my Facebook friends comment on those (through Facebook)–but they’re a lot less intrusive for them.

Jamie Thingelstad January 16, 2009 at 6:47 am: FriendFeed is a whole other can of worms. There, I think you can syndicate everything in and not care because it is what the site is about, and everyone using it understands that modality.

However, I don’t like FriendFeed stuff going back out. I realize this is the closest thing to a Lifestream for a lot of folks, but if such Lifestreams are intermingled with “real” content it gets confusing. IMHO.

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Lou Paglia January 18, 2009 at 8:43 am

I understand the mode issue between Twitter and Facebook. My issue is if I make this move, I may as well delete my Facebook account, I rarely go there unless someone engages me. In fact, I think in most cases I do go to FB, it is when someone is responding to something I’ve tweeted.

You are correct about the confusion factor, however. I’ve had a few occasions when speaking to friends IN PERSON (who would have thought that to happen) where they’ve said “it seems somethings you are having a conversation with someone already in your status”. So absolutely true on the downside.

Everyone is using these tools differently. Not sure there is a right or wrong way. The FriendFeed and Facebook info exchange makes it all the more confusing.

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Jim January 30, 2009 at 10:37 am

My biggest objection was simply that my twitter stream is like a private joke to close friends who get it. And Facebook, like it or not, has become a huge environment of people I know. My Mom is on Facebook. Does she really need to know that I just put my finger in the drink of the guy next to me on a flight?

Twitter, compared to Facebook anyway, is kind of still an in-club.

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Ira Mitchell January 30, 2009 at 10:55 am: This is exactly the reason that when my mom asked about Facebook at Thanksgiving, I changed the subject. She has no business in there.

“I love you mom, but I’m not going to ‘friend’ you. Pass the Tofurkey.”

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Greg March 2, 2009 at 10:17 am

I have recently joined twitter and it seems to be quite different to a simple “status update” as that of Facebook… I’m glad that this article backs up what I thought… despite it still seeming a minority view…

What I was thinking might be handy is a app that enables Tweets to be placed onto Facebook wall, leaving the FB status untouched… does that exist?

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