You hear people slam Twitter all the time about it’s 140 character limit.   “Life cannot be reduced to 140 characters”.  And yet,  when I compare Twitter with Facebook,  which gives us much more space to say things,  Twitter is where I go to find things about more serious matters.  My morning newspaper is Twitter.  Not Facebook.  I have grown to expect much more relevant and current news from Twitter,  so I am always reading Twitter first. Twitter people I follow point to articles , to blog  posts,  and share brief comments on how they react to the news.  This happens with FAR LESS frequency on Facebook.  Facebook is the place where I am more likely to hear about,  or even see (via photo),  what someone had for breakfast.

It’s fairly accurate to say that people tend to use Facebook to share pictures and family news.  I seem to have far more News items in Facebook than the friends I have there.  I also often post Tweets to Facebook,  because I feel that Facebook is short on News.   Sherry Turkle says in her book Alone Together,  that people use Facebook to construct their personal PR;  to show their preferred self to the world.  I think this is accurate.   I think this is also why there is  much less politics on Facebook than on Twitter (the exception to that is the Facebook “like” button.  I enjoy knowing  that there are Facebook friends who are “with me” on some of the feelings I express about what is happening in our world.  Perhaps as Facebook continues to tweak it’s Social Graph and the algorithims that link people and interests together,  it too will become a better source of news).

I read an article yesterday that implied that Facebook is actually looking at becoming a better news source.  That will  interest me greatly.  I’ll have to look up that link and update this here.