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Why I'm disconnecting Twitter from Facebook

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Jeremy Toeman

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:

twitter-boring

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

twitter-interesting

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.

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Posted in Web/Internet | 11 Comments
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11 thoughts on “Why I'm disconnecting Twitter from Facebook”

  1. PecanCtMichael says:
    July 2, 2009 at 11:35 am

    I have my Twitter stream set up to feed directly into Facebook as well. From what I can tell, any tweets that start with “@” (all replies) do not transfer over to my Facebook wall.

    This is still a problem with retweets and any replies that I purposefully start with “.” (so that people who don’t follow the person that I’m responding to can read them, and these always contain context including any URLs). I will usually copy and paste retweets into my wall (minus the original poster) since these are mostly links that I found interesting.

    I see the problem though, since I then have to delete retweets and replies from my Facebook Profile, but this doesn’t happen often enough that I would uncouple the two.

    Reply
  2. Khalid says:
    July 2, 2009 at 12:15 pm

    Good post JT. I thought about that myself when I hooked up my Twitter stream to FB, but I don’t tweet that much (not even 1x per day), so I decided it was easier than having to double-post to both Twitter and FB.

    Of course, I could use ping.fm to update my status *everywhere*… 😛

    Reply
  3. Brent Billock says:
    July 2, 2009 at 12:18 pm

    Facebook should be ignoring all of your @ replies, but it is up to you to chase down and delete any retweets that you think are interesting only to your Twitter followers and not your Facebook friends.

    Are your Twitter and Facebook audiences so different that the former would be interested in links you’re retweeting, but the latter would not?

    Reply
  4. James Geluso says:
    July 2, 2009 at 12:29 pm

    “Few-to-none of a twitterer’s followers are real-world friends.”

    Ah, but really? There is a disconnect, I think, between people who use Twitter professionally, following thousands, and people who use it personally. The main difference, I think, is that professionals are networking and following it on the Web or on other computer applications; lots of people, though, use Twitter on their phones. I follow 28 people, and maybe 10 of them I have on my phone. If someone puts their Twitters on their Facebook, I shut them off my phone feed; why do I need to see their statements twice, one of which involves pulling out my phone.

    Reply
  5. Jeremy Toeman says:
    July 2, 2009 at 12:44 pm

    @Brent – yes, my facebook friends are at least 2/3 people I know outside of technology, many of whom are not interested in Twitter (yup, still).

    @James – based on the variety of well-sourced articles, there just aren’t that many people who use twitter for purely personal reasons with purely personal groups…

    Reply
  6. Ben Drawbaugh says:
    July 2, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    For the most part I agree, RT should not be reposted on Facebook. I also catch myself not tweeting something because I don’t want it on facebook or just going and deleting it after the fact. The other thing I do is to disable the connection during trade shows etc when I know I’ll be tweeting alot.

    I see some people use the #FB tab, which makes it post on facebook, but I’m not sure which app they use for this.

    Reply
  7. mark says:
    July 2, 2009 at 2:42 pm

    My reason for keeping them separate is, I fly my geek flag on twitter.. and normal social life on facebook:)

    Reply
  8. mt says:
    July 2, 2009 at 9:39 pm

    umm. duh!
    YEs, this is quite obviously a problem that anyone who links the two services has faced.
    The facebook twitter app, switchabit and other such services are excellent tohugh!

    Reply
  9. David says:
    July 8, 2009 at 5:21 am

    Use Selective Twitter, which only relays to FB if you tag the Tweet with #FB.

    Reply
  10. umdivx says:
    July 14, 2009 at 8:38 am

    There is Selective twitter for facebook, so when you do your twitter msg and then add #fb at the end when using the selective twitter app, that is the only way it’ll send a status update to facebook.

    So if you then wanted to do a status update with twitter, and have it also sent to facebook that is the easiest way I have found and still retain your greek cred between the two sites.

    Reply
  11. beenther says:
    March 15, 2010 at 7:56 am

    alli want to do is get rid of this.i do not have cellphone.many probs since accidently putting twitter on.now it will not let me disconnect per instructions.help

    Reply

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Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.

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