It’s always amusing to hear the reaction when you tell people you do/don’t use Twitter/Facebook. It’s been about a year, maybe a little more since I started using Twitter. It’s an interesting thing that’s captured people. Someone at the wedding said “I don’t care if you’ve been eating a taco today!” It’s true that for general or normal people, you may not get the same degree of interest as someone in the spotlight, but if you use it among friends you’ll find interesting tidbits of info about people without having to ask.

I also find that it’s a more accessible style of RSS. If you follow the right people or even use search you can be kept up on really current events. Interesting you can lag behind quite a bit as well. I’ve been doing daily Starcraft 2 searches and I’ll find some gems but the bulk of the news in that area is people finding out there’s no LAN which is month old news. Lots of news sites are also on Twitter so like I said, you can use this as a much easier to use/understand RSS client.

I guess there’s a lot of quality control that’s difficult to filter for new users. Do you want to know when someone is pooping or do you want to be kept up to date with [insert news outlet of choice]? Another problem is what software do you use to keep up with Twitter? I suspect most people assume that you can only access it from the web site and have no idea that there are really great suites like Tweetdeck around, although personally Tweetdeck eats up too much memory for my tastes.

Twitter has this sort of raw, behind the scenes feel to it though. When you’re following someone with more than 50,000 followers you feel like you’re getting an uncensored window into the actual person that doesn’t have to be fed through some PR machine. For now I guess there’s going to be a sharp division on whether or not you find it useful, but I’d advise getting a username you want now.

Ok on to Facebook. I’ve always been against the MySpace/Facebook trend because I always considered them Geocities 2.0. I mean looking at MySpace you still get that feeling, those layouts are generally horrible. Secondly, I already had this site locked down and didn’t seen the need to have accounts there.

As for Facebook I just lumped it in there because it seemed like they went hand in hand, but I broke down and snagged an account. The user base is just stupidly large. I’m very irritated that I lost out on the facebook.com/timothyhanson page so I dunno what I’m going to do about that. I guess you can’t have it all.

Looks like another button for the Around the Web, though that does throw off the sizing of that area. I really need to find a Pandora button to use as well.