Facebook vs. Twitter

With a new design comes a new article, and one which will divide people, as I ask, "Which is really better: Facebook or Twitter?"


A few years ago, the most prominent social networking site amongst my peers was MySpace. 
Who even uses MySpace now? Who remembers the adolescent arguments on the bulletin boards, and everybody copying, pasting and filling in the same quizzes? The fact is, it got silly, and everybody grew up moved to Facebook. Millions of people have Facebook. In fact, it's more of a shock to meet somebody - particularly in the younger generation - who is not on Facebook. Whenever it has come up in conversation, I think I have found out that three people of roughly my age that I have met who fit into this category. 


As is obvious from this website, I use Facebook, and I have, unfortunately and on many occasions, fallen prey to the wonderful procrastination that it offers: an essay is due, or there is an exam for which I need to revise, and I am all set to settle down and get on with it... except, oh, my internet is connected. And there is Facebook. And before I know it, I have just spent an hour and a half doing absolutely nothing. I am not alone. No one who has ever procrastinated through Facebook can tell you what they have spent a substantial amount of time doing on it.


But lately, I feel that Facebook is beginning to deteriorate in quality. (Yes all that useful, brilliant quality Facebook used to have...) When I said earlier that people grew up, I lied. I find many of the pages one can "like" irritating, stupid, and not-funny. Some of them are even what I would call offensive, and some of the people are similar. At least, it certainly seems that procrastination is not so easy there as it once was. I find Facebook much more boring than before; I actually find myself getting on with tasks I have to do now, and when that is not the case then I spend more time on a different website... Yes, you've guessed it: Twitter.


I was skeptical of Twitter when it first started to break through. I created an account in 2009, and this is my first-ever tweet:

"(immicatherine/Imogen Watson) just booked onto her first open day at Bath later this month. Yay! :D (New to twitter, doubt it'll get updated much...)"

Yes, insightful information shared there. However, my seventeen-year-old self spoke correctly in those parentheses. It was another month before my next tweet, and another thirteen months until the next. Neither of which, like the first, were very enlightening. But slowly and rather intermittently, I began to tweet more often and follow more people and, although I have obviously heard people rubbish it, Twitter is fast becoming a lot more interesting and useful than Facebook. You can choose who you want to follow; there is no pressure to follow anybody who follows you (unless you succumb easily to such things!) unlike with Facebook friend requests where one often feels obliged to accept this person who has no recognisable features but still went to your school... 

More importantly, if you choose to follow news twitter pages (@BBCNews or @washingtonpost, for example), you can get breaking headlines (although follow too many and you'll end up with the same headlines fourteen times down your timeline) and just in a shortened form. There are also your friends, celebrities (if you really want) and people connected with your favourite television show (figure that one out!) such as the writers, journalists, and directors. If it were not for Twitter, I probably would not have managed to go to the press screening of Let's Kill Hitler, as that was down to journalist @BenjaminCook posting the ticket link online. I also use Twitter to find out facts that I did not previously know, and to follow comedy accounts - a personal favourite is @Lord_Voldemort7. Whoever runs that is a very funny person.

Another plus is that you have to be fairly concise on Twitter. That one person (or multiple people) on Facebook who goes on and on (and on) has no place on Twitter. There you may seek your refuge. However, even once you have escaped this person, you run into the flaw in Twitter which is that it has the obvious flaw of being based on words, not pictures. You can share pictures, of course, but there is no storage quite like the benefit of picture-sharing on Facebook, even if they do keep changing the layout and the format and making it more complex and different than it needs to be. Then there are trending topics. When Kate Winslet was being talked about rather a lot among British tweeters, and I did not know why, I clicked, and Twitter updated me.

This does lead me to another issue though, and that is the number of fans of Justin Bieber and One Direction there are on Twitter. As is the case with the world at large, there are too many of them, and unfortunately, occasionally they make one or other of them trend for no apparent reason. I roll my eyes, perhaps moan slightly and move on. There is, on the other hand, a sense of joy when something you do care about manages to trend.

So there we go with my impressions of current social networking. Generally speaking, I would rather be on Twitter, but then using them both, and also using the block button, is probably more beneficial! But as mentioned earlier, MySpace was once the king, and now I picture it as a scene in a Western but without the shootings, so perhaps Twitter and Facebook will shortly go the same way? With my views, I expect to be in a minority, really but nevertheless, after all my years and months of procrastination, it will still take a good while before anything overtakes my most-visited Google Chrome website, Facebook.




Comments welcomed as always, and find me on Twitter or Facebook above.