Welcome to the Multi-Conversational Web
The new Facebook page redesign has incorporated real time friend feeds that makes Facebook more conversational like... Friendfeed or Twitter. What this means is any friends can respond instantly to conversations as they happen:
With three applications - Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed - competing for participants, applications are developing to efficiently monitor these conversations. Twhirl and Tweetdeck, two leading Twitter clients, have integrated Friendfeed, and Facebook, respectively (see today's Tweetdeck announcement).
Different Conversations
Last week, David Armano analyzed how each age group uses social media differently for either social purposes like making friends and lovers, or for professional purposes like career networking. This chart is self explanatory:
This certainly explains why high schoolers are predominantly on Facebook over Twitter. Applying the above chart, one can chart where each social network "plays":
Note that Twitter is unique as the network that can attract massive follower/friend bases (many networks are over 50,000 now). It works best as a networking application by exposing users to large interstitial networks conducive to matching likeminded Twitterers together. From my experience, many of my new Twitter relationships are "discovered" through shared interests and eventually become more "intimate" by joining me in Facebook and other social networks (red arrow) . This is why Twitterers naturally gravitate towards building massive networks and why Jason Calacanis famously (at least in the social media world) offered Twitter $250,000 for placement in its "Recommended Users" list.
Twitter's value is to attract and influence on a massive level, and opportunities that arise out of this aether can be plumbed within the more intimate confines of smaller networks like Facebook or LinkedIn.
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Mr. Tweet's Ming Yeow explains it well with this slideshow: Twitter is the best "discovery" application:
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