A couple of months ago, we were encouraged to start using Twitter in one of my masters-level online courses. I was debating whether or not to follow the media hype, give in and sign up for a Twitter account, but then a thought dawned on me:
‘What’s the difference between Tweets and Facebook status updates?’
I’m a regular Facebook user (it hasn’t started getting on my nerves yet). I update my status a few times each week and rather enjoy reading the updates of those in my network. So I didn’t really understand what added value a Twitter account would give me.
While in the throws of this heated debate with myself (oh yes! heated I say!), I posted a message in my tutor group’s discussion forum asking my fellow classmates whether they saw a difference in these two forms of microblogging?
Days went by, status updates updated, and yet no one responded to my message in FirstClass. So, I let it go and moved on to the next week’s tasks, deciding not to become a Tweeter after all.
It’s just a few weeks ’til the end of my MA, and as I find myself contemplating how I’ll structure my FINAL project (!!!), my mind seems to be wandering back to that lonely question.
This time though, instead of looking for answers among my kind, I head to Google, which in turn leads me to Gavin Purcell’s blog post in which he attempts to answer this very question! Instead of posting a message in a restricted-access discussion forum that’s hardly been used lately since I have a feeling that we’re all slowly but surely being sucked dry by all the course work (not to mention life!), Purcell went right to the source. He relied on his Twitter network for answers and posted a Tweet with the very question that’s been on my mind for weeks.
In his blog entry, he made note of some answers his Tweet generated. Just for a virtual moment, I’d like to take a look at a few of them, break them down and reflect on whether they help me figure this one out. However before I start, I feel inclined to state that this ‘breaking down’ process is totally based on my perspective in an effort for me to make sense of my understanding of these two technologies. It’s by no means a way to criticize any of the Tweeters. If you have a different viewpoint to share, you’re more than welcome to add a comment below :).
@techdiva66 twitter is short, character-limited updates & facebook gives you more options for communicating as well as games & apps
Two things about this answer:
(1) Emphasizing the character limitations of Twitter makes it sound like Facebook status updates are verbosely cumbersome (i.e. long), which is really not true at all. Personally, I haven’t seen many over 20-25 words with most ranging between 2 and 10 words.
(2) We’re just talking about status updates vs. tweets here – not debating the similarities of the two platforms.
@jpurnell twitter is lower-stakes status updates
Why lower-stakes?
@brew7vwp on twitter you talk to strangers you like, on facebook you talk to friends you barely remember
Interesting…this, I think, could be true, depending on your networking strategies. I actually ‘like’ the people in my Facebook network (what up homies!?!) although I am sometimes put in a awkward position to keep it that way. So, this one doesn’t quite apply to me but I can see how it could be relevant to others. Moving on…
@victordlt Twitter is Facebook in KISS mode (Keep it Simple Stupid). More Simple and Faster.
How long do these people take to post status updates and who do they think reads them!? I suppose if my Facebook network was composed of work colleagues and I was trying to professionally brand myself through the updates (…isn’t that what LinkedIn is for…?), then ok, I can maybe see how it might be stressful to post an update. But I’ve never really associated updating my status as a difficult or time consuming activity. Am I missing something here…?
@calindrome Twitter is a cocktail party; Facebook is recess.
…k…I had to think about this one for a while.
Cocktail party: frivolous, cheeky, unpredictable.
Recess: break time (with the intention to get right back to work), catching up with those you know.
Yeah, ok, this makes a lot of sense. But how would this answer help justify Twitter as an educational technology tool?
@Goose Facebook is Twitter for people with Internet agoraphobia.
…taking that to mean that Twitter supports a more open network structure…ok…worth noting…
@JD_Southard Facebook is so 2008. Twitter is a social networking experiment in real time connecting people thru a limited # of characters
I have to be honest with you…I actually like words so this one doesn’t sell me on Twitter… Nor is the 2008 reference that convincing since I’m trying to play devil’s advocate with new and emerging technologies in order not to fall into the habit of adopting technologies for the sake of technology.
@ahachmi twitter is where you can vent your mood, sure fbook does the same, but in Twitter it is nothing but the venting of thoughts.
So…why would anyone choose to be witness to venting? And if Twitter is the vent, then what is Facebook? The vaccuum? The Swiffer Duster?
@MyNameisRazzle Facebook Status without the Facebook.
Which brings me back to my original question – is there any value added in having accounts with both?
After going through this little self-imposed reflective activity, I think I’ve come away with more questions than answers. I’ve clarified some important things for myself though: Twitter = open network structure & cocktails vs. recess. Personal networking strategies may also play an important role in the dynamics of these two platforms but clarifying the intentions of the users and knowing one’s audience might be helpful here. But maybe it’s too soon to make any judgments seeing how quickly things are changing.
I should get back to work now, but before I go, I wanted to leave you with a little side note: as I was drafting this post, I updated my Facebook status, asking my network what they thought was the difference between Tweets and updates. Perhaps it’s because it’s the middle of a week day and everyone is hard at work, but I didn’t get any replies.
7 Responses
August 20th, 2009 at 11:28 am
I felt I had to reply to this because not too long ago, I found myself asking the same questions! I love Facebook and use it all the time, and my husband, who is a big Twitter fan, thought I might enjoy Twitter as well so he signed me up for an account. At first, I didn’t see what all the hype was about. On Facebook, I would post things and get responses, but on Twitter, I rarely ever got responses for things I would post, and I hated that. I wanted to be able to engage in conversations with others on topics that I “tweeted” about, and I couldn’t figure out why, if my tweets were going out to the whole Twitter universe, nobody was bothering to respond. So, I abandoned Twitter for awhile and just stuck with Facebook. However, I soon began to wonder if there was another way I might be able to use Twitter, and I decided to try an experiment in a class I was teaching this past summer. I teach statistics, and I asked my students to sign up for Twitter accounts and to tweet about things they were finding in the news related to statistics. My students really got into this, and I found this to be a great way for ME to communicate with my students outside of class about neat things I too was finding in the news (things I might not have the time to discuss in class). I’m going to continue doing this, and I hope this will become a regular part of future classes I teach. The moral of my story is that I had to change my expectations about Twitter. I went into it thinking it was going to be just like Facebook, but it’s clearly not, and I now realize that is okay.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Hi Michelle,
Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I wonder if you could ellaborate (or ask your students to contribute to this discussion) on what benefits the group derived from sharing resources on Twitter. The reason I ask is because (as I mention above), this year we’ve been encouraged to engage in Twitter as a class, and I chose not to sign up for an account. I’m normally one of the first to try out a new technology, but in this context, I wondered whether more information would add any significant value to my learning experience. I already see that, due to time restrictions and course work requirements, I partially embark on so many research tangents that are of interest to me only to have to abandon them mid-stream. The prospect of getting fed with even more links and stories and interesting ideas just felt a bit much. Do you think the use of Twitter in a learning context would be more or less beneficial for undergraduates vs. masters and PhD students?
August 20th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
I think when I do this again in the fall, I will try to gather more information from my students about what they liked (or didn’t like) about this Twitter “experiment.” In the summer, I didn’t do that, but I got the sense that several of the students who participated enjoyed it. I was teaching in the classroom this summer, in a computer lab, and sometimes I would arrive early to class or stay late and I would hear students talking about Twitter or I would observe them trying to find things to “tweet” about. I loved that! One student told me that this exercise made him a lot more aware of what he was seeing and hearing in the news, and he said he would like to try something like this in a class he would be teaching in the fall. I’m sure some students did perceive this as just one more thing I wanted them to do, and because I didn’t want to force anyone to sign up for Twitter who was not comfortable, I did not force this onto my students. Instead, it was an extra credit opportunity, and I gave students one point for each of their “tweets” (provided they included a link to the source they were tweeting about and a short description or critique of this source). Students could earn up to five extra points for tweeting five different things. I did try to encourage the students to read what others were posting, but I did not give credit for that, and I think only a handful of students may have done this (given that only a few students took the time to reply to anything tweeted by me or a classmate). If you are interested in seeing what we did and you are on Twitter, just type #epsy5261 in as a search term to get everything related to my “experiment.” I do have to admit that I did this in a graduate-level course, and I’m not quite sure if it would work the same way with undergrads. I would hope that maybe MORE of the undergrads would familiar with social networking and would be intrigued by something like this, but I’ve heard that not as many “younger people” are Twittering (http://mashable.com/2009/08/05/teens-dont-tweet/), so maybe it would be more challenging to get the undergrads on board with something like this. Plus, I really think if you are going to use something like Twitter, you need to “sell” your students on what the benefits might be for them to use it. I tried to tie it to one of the learning goals of the class–to help students become more statistically literate and to be more critical consumers of statistics in the news and media–and I feel this also meshed well with one goal of Twitter–to get information out to the masses. If I were merely asking my students to “tweet” and tell me what they were doing to prepare for class, or what they thought about the class, I don’t know that it would have been perceived as anything more than busy work.
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:10 am
Well I am sorry that I did not reply to your post on FC. This is an interesting point and a question I find personally relevant. I Tweet more than use Facebook but my Tweets do get relayed onto Facebook. My preference for Tweets is really that I have tweetdeck and so it is on as I sit and try to get enthusiastic about writing my ECA. I enjoy hearing the snippets about peoples lives without all the games and invitations to send Karma etc that I encounter on FB. You might argue that this is not relevant but it interferes with the stream on consciosnesses that I enjoy on Twitter. Thanks for this interesting discussion, I nearly chose Twitter and Facebook as my two technologies however have elected to do Twitter and Forums. On e of the main strands for this will be a contrast of the potential development of online personality and I think that Twitter and FB both allow this.
September 16th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Breaking news! Facebook @mentions – status tagging: http://mashable.com/2009/09/14/facebook-status-tagging-live/
May 19th, 2010 at 6:32 am
I felt I had to reply to this because not too long ago, I found myself asking the same questions! I love Facebook and use it all the time, and my husband, who is a big Twitter fan, thought I might enjoy Twitter as well so he signed me up for an account. At first, I didn’t see what all the hype was about. On Facebook, I would post things and get responses, but on Twitter, I rarely ever got responses for things I would post, and I hated that. I wanted to be able to engage in conversations with others on topics that I “tweeted” about, and I couldn’t figure out why, if my tweets were going out to the whole Twitter universe, nobody was bothering to respond. So, I abandoned Twitter for awhile and just stuck with Facebook. However, I soon began to wonder if there was another way I might be able to use Twitter, and I decided to try an experiment in a class I was teaching this past summer. I teach statistics, and I asked my students to sign up for Twitter accounts and to tweet about things they were finding in the news related to statistics. My students really got into this, and I found this to be a great way for ME to communicate with my students outside of class about neat things I too was finding in the news (things I might not have the time to discuss in class). I’m going to continue doing this, and I hope this will become a regular part of future classes I teach. The moral of my story is that I had to change my expectations about Twitter. I went into it thinking it was going to be just like Facebook, but it’s clearly not, and I now realize that is okay.
May 19th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Thanks so much for your comment Bruce. The first thing that strikes me about what you wrote is that you ‘love Facebook’. Lately I’ve been wondering how I feel about Facebook – I’m experiencing a notable shift in the way I perceive my Facebook experience but I’m not really sure what the change in my preferences means yet. There was definitely a time when I liked using the site a lot, but for some reason, it just doesn’t ‘do it’ for me anymore. Yes, I still like keeping in touch with friends, but since there is increasing concern about the privacy policies imposed on the site’s users (like the new “Instant Personalization” privacy setting), not many people are posting photos anymore, and that was my favorite part of the social networking site. I’m not sure which way I’m leaning on the topic of Facebook yet, but I’m definitely still not sold on Twitter (for my personal use).
The way that you integrated the use of Twitter in your statistics class is quite interesting though. It highlights a potential benefit of Twitter for EXISTING groups. I can see how it can provide the platform to quickly and easily exchange or aggregate information. However, as you explain from your own experiences, Twitter doesn’t do a great job of building communities, perhaps because of the very fact that it is so dispersed and is able to instantly reach such vast audiences. The way that you were able to use Twitter to communicate with your students outside of class also begs the question of whether it’s an effective platform for mobile learning/communication (the limitations on the amount of text included in a single Tweet certainly compliment the nature of other forms of mobile communication like text messaging). Great to hear you were able to make a technology work for you 🙂
Thanks again for your message!