Since I’ve been talking about twitter lately, I thought I’d share some thoughts about how I’ve been using it, and how this differs from some of my other social networking practices.
When I first started doing social networking regularly (was it Friendster? Tribe? Let’s say Myspace), I was very particular about whom I friended. I would only accept requests from people I knew well at first, which restricted my networking essentially to friends. After a while (and coincident perhaps with my move to Facebook), I began more liberally adding friends. I add people I’ve met once, say, at the bar, or old classmates to whom I haven’t spoken in 20 years, if ever. I have some students in my friends list. It’s a much looser list, but still people I have personally met.
On twitter my practice is altogether different. I add strangers who look interesting, friends of friends, people whose blogs I follow, people with similar interests, bands, institutions. Why? I’m not sure, to be honest, but I can take a few guesses. First, although I use it to chronicle my life constantly, twitter seems less personal. No pics, no lists of interests, no external apps, just text mostly, which for some reason seems less instrusive. Maybe it’s the 140 character limit – I don’t feel I have to get bogged down in a long treatise, on, say, twitter practices, when I read a tweet.
Also, I think there’s something to the asymmetrcality of the system. On FB and MS, you have to friend people or not – it ‘s a choice that is forced on you. If you want to see someone’s stuff, they have to see yours (privacy settings aside). If someone wants to be your “friend,” you have to be theirs. On twitter people can feel free to follow me and I have no pressure to do the same (although I often do) and I can follow peeople without them feeling like I, I don’t know, want something from them.
Jane (@janefader) once tweeted “For me, using twitter is like sneaking off to facebook’s VIP lounge” andI think there’s something to that, a certain type of specifity and granularity, perhaps. At any rate, little of this is built into the twitter system, and most of this is my idiosyncratic take on using social networking sites. How does your social network usage change across systems?
