Subscribe to my 
I’ve recently become quite an addict of Twitter. I just really seem to prefer it a hundred times more than Facebook, and you can see this preference when you compare the number of status updates I post to Twitter and Facebook.
Many people just don’t seem to “get” Twitter, especially when compared to something like Facebook. They might say why use Twitter when Facebook does the same and more? What they don’t really realize is that Facebook has actually been evolving over time to be more and more like Twitter.
Another high point about Twitter is that all relationships between people are asymmetrical: You can follow me, but I do not have to follow you (Facebook Page’s replicated this relationship). This enables thousands of peons to follow their favorite celebrity, but the celebrity does not have to follow them back (yet some do, such as Collective Soul).
But at the same time, both of these services are needed in today’s world of Social Networking. Although they both do similar things, they each have their own feel and vibe. Facebook’s focus is on closed social groups: You, your friends, your family, etc. Facebook originated essentially as a contact book between friends. Sharing photos on Facebook, in my opinion, was probably the best promotion of the service. Unlimited photo uploads (side note: 200 photo albums now!) plus tagging of friends gave users another reason to keep coming back and checking regularly. Facebook chat gave another means of communication beyond wall posts and status updates. Applications expanded the possibilities immensely (but suddenly gave the feeling of a new MySpace era — and I absolutely hate MySpace).
Twitter’s focus is the best part about it: how public and open it is. And here is where I turn to my main point, from the view of a developer: Twitter’s API is ridicuolously easy to access, whereas Facebook’s API requires a few more hoops to jump through even to do something simple like access your own Status updates to put on your webpage (which I managed to find a work-around for).
Here is an example using one of Twitter’s many API libraries called Twitterizer for C# .NET 2.0:
1 2 | Twitter t = new Twitter(UserName, Password); t.Status.Update(UpdateString); |
So simple that it requires but only two lines of code!
However, since my last post on how to get a Facebook Status, some changes have been made to the Facebook API in February to make things a bit more simpler to update/get a status. And not only that, but Facebook is additionally opening up to the idea of allowing people to post public status updates like Twitter. Since Facebook failed to buyout Twitter, it surely seems like they are trying to keep their edge on the competition against them.
And of course: I, for one, welcome my new Social Networking overlords!
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 10:30 pmand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
