Ruben

Some of this could be achieved by the savvy user who stiches together (via plug-ins, api, etc.) a hybrid interface that uses Twitter like this but the average user won’t be able to do that and they will be back at the “pick the network” problem.

Something else that comes to mind is that the lack of taxonomy in the Twitter stream (what hash or “^like” construct means what) makes harder to use in an ecosystem than a well defined construct such as the Facebook “like”. Amazon can’t look up or count on how to “like” something in the raw Twitter flow right now. This probably makes it easier for them to adopt something like Facebook “like.”

Maybe someone needs to take a tool like TweetDeck and stretch it to use Twitter as you suggest and also overlay the taxonomy that will add the meaning for allowing Facebook “like” and things like “digg” to ride on top. The tool would have to be pretty ubiquitous for the taxonomy to stick, and I expect that to be a significant challenge as well.

Good conversation… Thanks!
@JeffVilimek

The way I see it in this proposal, it doesn’t matter if you have any follower. Twitter is used as a dumb pipe, that moves your data from the sites that publish profile info about you (with your authorization) by tweeting for you to the sites that consume profile information about you by listening for your tweets (e.g. you can tell LinkedIn, Facebook and any other such site to listen to your tweets). In that configuration, it doesn’t matter if none of your friends look at your twitter feed. They’ll get your data as part of your Facebook/LinkedIn etc profile. Twitter is just an intermediary that allows you to have your data re-used beyond a single social network and allows you to monitor what sites share about you.

One way to look at it is that the user doesn’t have to know about Twitter any more than the average Web user has to understand how DNS works. Almost (you still have to create the account).

In short, my point is not that Twitter is a better social network than Facebook. It’s that Twitter is a great data bus for social profile information, on its way to various social networks.

However, it can be easily argued that all these conditions exist on non-social networking sites. For example, the government, financial institutions etc. have all made mistakes causing personal data to leak or made public.

My Twitter feed has always been private aka protected. I monitor follow requests, check on the requestor and decline there requests on a regular basis if they are not at all symbiotic. ie theres no obvious connection between us, especially not just because I follow someone they follow. Alm ost no tweets of mine can be found in the google cache, sure you can find responses and mentions but all from people I’ve pre-vetted.

The same is true of facebook, none of my facebook data is available, not withstanding the conditions described above.

So, it’s really a question of how one choses ones friends. I doubt very few people signed on to facebook just to make their pictures, friends names, birthdays and other “personal” information publicly available by default.

While the changes so far have not raised a revolt amongst the masses, they will once this information becomes more and more exploited.

There is much Facebook needs to do in terms of monitoring application providers, ensuring they “do no evil” etc. before I for one would allow my facebook information, and that of my friends become “instantly social”.

If my friends are sloppy and provide my information out inadvertently then I’m prepared to forgive, if they do it deliberately then I for one won’t have them as facebook friends, and we’ll have to do with real world friendship.

After all, if a marketing company came up to you in a restaurant and asked you for the likes, date of birth, marital status, number of childern, other personal information and some photographs of the woman you were having dinner with, would you give it to them without asking her permission? And if you did, would you be surprised if she dropped you as a “friend”?

However, the problem with Twitter is with whom you are talking to. Only in the case of the advanced user that has carefully cultivated a network and clearly understands the following vs. follower model will your “Like” go where you mean it to. The average user doesn’t really care about telling the LoC that they liked whatever they liked, they want to tell their “friends.” The friend model is where Twitter breaks down some for the average and especially for the new user. Advanced users can as you suggest connect Twitter in to Facebook, but average and new users don’t, so they need to pick a network.

I wrote a post that talks about this in more detail (with Venn diagrams!) over the weekend and posted it on my blog this morning: http://www.jeffvilimek.com/2010/05/why-twitter-fails-and-facebook-wins-as-a-social-network

Perhaps mining the more structured data out of the Facebook walled garden and pumping it into the Twitter pool is something to explore.