A while back, I wrote a post about communication online. If you're extra-good, I'll link to it tomorrow when I'm not typing this on my phone in bed because I forgot to earlier.
Anyway. The gist of it was that I was rather pleased with how my then-early Twitter addiction was proceeding, with the service making it particularly easy for me to keep up with my numerous buddies from around the world. Prior to this, Facebook had fulfilled a similar function.
Here's where the paths of the two services diverge. While Twitter has remained relatively "pure", with little in the way of gimmicky new features, Facebook has taken the opposite route, adding more and more noise to the mix until it's almost unbearable.
Of course, there is the flipside to both services – Twitter has its spammers (bad) and Facebook has Facebook Connect (good) – but I know where I have most of my online conversations these days. Twitter may have its own noise, but it is WAY easier to avoid.
Facebook's problem is that it wants to be everything to everyone, so it added the applications, and the fan pages, and the various redesigns… and now I find myself wishing it was back the way it was when I first started using it. Simple. Clean. To the point.
It's certainly not that any more. Now, one's news feed is likely to be as full of notifications from applications and announcements that Bartlebas McFartington has become a fan of "Not Being Able To Sleep Because Your [sic] Thinking About Crap" (yes, that was real, and no, no-one knows how to use "your" any more) as actual things that people have written themselves.
The ironic thing is that all this sharing is taking away from the original point of the service – communicating. When people would rather copy and paste "Bob" into your comments box so he can "travel around Facebook" than actually write a message to you, one can't help but think that the point has been lost along the way somewhere, (While we're on, people who just say "First" in an attempt to get the first comment – without actually commenting – can go to hell and sit on a spike, too.)
So next time you hover over that "Like" button, why not take those extra few seconds to actually write a message? The recipient will probably appreciate it, and time isn't as precious as you think it is.
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Actually, this comment is a response to what you wrote on the eponymous Facebook earlier.
It sucks that there are legitimate apps and fan pages that get shoved into obscurity because someone needs to "get a million votes so my sister will name her next child Megatron". But I agree – Twitter is the best way to pseudo-chat with friends without the need for constant filtration.