Oh, man. Every now and then your heroes validate themselves and it is magical. Two of my long-time internet heroes posted essays today about the difference between Twitter and Facebook, and both essays are absolutely brilliant.
Matt Haughey, the founder of metafilter, a site I’ve frequented since the end of 1999, published an article on Medium titled Why I Love Twitter and Barely Tolerate Facebook. In it he perfectly explains how I’ve felt about the two sites for years.
Jason Kottke, a blogger I’ve been reading regularly for fifteen years and — I’m not ashamed to say — the inspiration for davidgagne.net, read Matt’s post and wrote Twitter Is a Machine for Continual Self-Reinvention. Jason’s essay is another must-read; he likens the ephemeral nature of tweets to the vitality of New York City.
I joined Facebook in September of 2006, but didn’t start using it for at least three years. And I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to it by the tidal wave of friends and family that seem to think “Facebook” is synonymous with “the Internet”. To this day I — like Matt — only begrudgingly check it for updates, and the vast, vast majority of my posts there are simply the by-product of other things I’m doing online.
I joined Twitter in April of 2007 and immediately fell in love with the service. I’ve been tweeting continuously ever since, and if I bothered to create a line chart showing the declining frequency of posts on this blog compared to the number of times I’ve tweeted, you’d see something very close to a perfect X.
* I first heard of the two essays on stellar.io, a site Jason created which lets me see tweets that my followers have favorited. I highly, highly recommend getting a stellar account if you can.