The second of my two part Twitter feature inspired by comments I made on an article entitled Correct Twitter Usage on my good friend Spode’s Think About Tech website. Part I: ‘Twitter & The Land of Opportunity’ can be found here.

Let’s get this lazy comparison scrubbed from the very first line: I don’t believe Facebook and Twitter are even remotely connected.

The old line: “Twitter is mass Facebook status updates for your friends” I believe to be utter – well – shite. The difference is Facebook has a certain ‘distance’ to it. With it I feel I get to know something about the LIVES of my friends on it and also the school friends I haven’t seen in years, but vitally many – if not most – of my Facebook friends I have no desire to interact with. Facebook is largely voyeuristic.

What are you doing with your time right now?

By contrast, Twitter is INTERACTIVE. Sure, there are professional sites simply rehashing their RSS feeds but they are largely catastrophic failures when you consider their number of followers when proportional to their site’s web audience.

No, Twitter is not about saying “I polished my car today” it is about interaction. It is a great online IM brothel between your friends/respected colleagues or others and one which goes on whether you are there are not. With Twitter I genuinely feel I have BONDED with virtually all of those I follow, I have not just watched them from afar via a sterile ‘Today’ page. I would even go so far as to say Twitter has helped improve social relations with a number of friends because we no longer need to engage in fatuous small talk . We already KNOW what is going on with one another’s lives and have often commented on it via Twitter so when we meet up we already feel comfortable, can cut the “so how has your week been…” waffle and have far more meaningful conversations.

Personally speaking, I know many people have issues with Twitter but let me be blunt here. If you find the people you follow say things you find dull then DON’T follow them. Cruel as it may sound I have many good friends in real life whose Twitter feeds I do not enjoy. I had the stones to remove them and we get on as if Twitter never existed.

Do you really participate with Facebook or just sit back and watch?

Likewise for those I do continue to follow I find I now feel genuinely closer to them. Their tweets delight, entertain and touch me about the goings on in their lives. One friend in particular who is living abroad I watch to see how his very ill son is coping. From his Twitter updates alone and my occasional real time responses to them I feel more useful than 50 Facebook wall messages, virtual app flowers, ‘pokes’, and picture posts ever could.

In essence then, perhaps what I am trying to say is that while Twitter can seemingly be written off by generalist and trite statements it is actually a hybrid creating a new form of communication. A merger of Facebook and IM, a grand forum or cyberspace town hall where you can share your daily/weekly/monthly highs and lows in a way representative of what drives you in this wonderful thing called the human condition.

Hardest of all however is to realise your own tweets paint an unrelenting self portrait, something which scares away many. Yet hopefully this close-up study of yourself and others also brings about realisation of where and how more can be made of your own life. After all, it will give you more interesting things to Tweet about…

Link: Twitter Gordon Kelly Profile (follow me and see just how exciting/dull my life is!)

Time to chip in on what seems to be the hottest of hot topics recently: Twitter. It is the first of two features I’ll be publishing on web’s hottest topic. [Update: Part II: 'Can Tweets Change Your Life' Is Here]

Interstingly, this post was inspired by what began as a short comment on my great friend Spode’s excellent Think about Tech website and evolved into something altogether more substantial. Here’s a slightly revised version:

I’d like to address this Twitter usage issue as I think I see it from a slightly different viewpoint: it’s called natural evolution. The clear split between personal and professional users.

In one corner you have the original Twitter message: “What are you doing?” Admirably backed up by a recent post from Twitter king Stephen Fry where he declares: “For me Twittering is not a commercial or PR activity, it’s a fun and fascinating way to interact with all kinds of people who have so much to say. Since the primary function of Twitter is to answer the question “what you are doing?” my tweets will sometimes, obviously, involve news of publications or openings or events. Just be assured I am not using Twitter to advertise!”

Thanks Stephen by this is naive. You couldn’t manage your 100,000 followers without the assistance of your army of agents, secretaries and general helpers. After all, you may only be using Twitter in a social/interactive way but to allow this your life is being professionally managed in the background.

Everyone for each other or everyone for themselves?

Against this you have the undeniable fact that Twitter is an incredible mind hive/thought shower/[insert cringe worthy marketing term here]. For example, on my Twitter profile about 70% of my 310-ish followers are fellow journalists and PRs. This doesn’t bother me, in fact I quite like it as a giant online resource. I can throw out questions and expect (reasonably) intelligent answers from a wide array of sources. In fact, when Twitter (almost inevitably) hits Facebook/MySpace levels of popularity I’m not sure I really want my friends hearing that I’m struggling with a Windows 7 beta installation incompatibility or witnessing my delight as I proclaim a product like NuevaSync to my geeky circle.

In essence then I think Twitter is headed down two unstoppable paths simultaneously and ultimately it will get torn in two with professional and social settings and possibly even separate sites.

As for the pros and cons of Twitter as a whole, I recognise it is a horrendous time swallower – that’s a well known fact – but I think there are benefits in taking time to become established in an emerging medium. Take a look at the likes of friend and US tech journo colleague Veronica Belmont who has been there since the very beginning in early 2006. She has amassed almost 60,000 followers and like Stephen Fry this has only enhanced her career. Veronica was already a respected writer and now with the help of Twitter she’s something of an industry celeb  – whether she signed up for this reason or not.

Consequently it’s naive to think Twitter can continue its humble mission of “What are you doing?” at least in its current form. As a tool its potential benefits for the individual have grown so powerful that so we can’t castigate professionals, small companies and even corporations for trying to better their prospects through it. Whether they can pull this off is another matter entirely. But just look at where it has taken the razor sharp humour of Twitter’s Darth Vader persona in just 300 tweets…

As I concluded my Think About Tech post: “I think I’ll be swiping some of this for my own blog and posting it on Twitter”…

Can you blame me?

Part II Here