All You Do Is Twitter . . . You Should Get Out More . . . Like Facebook . . .

This post over at TMST got me thinking about a recent episode of Whadda Ya Know. One of their guests was Julia Angwin, author of Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America.

They discussed the creation of MySpace and the differences between Facebook and Twitter. I know next to nothing about all three although I do play in the shallow end of Twitter.

From what I understand, MySpace let's you decorate your page in an infinite number of ways. All Facebook pages are essentially the same and on Twitter you don't even have a page - you are basically your own wire service - sending messages into the void.

It's funny to me that Facebook is considered "relational" while Twitter is somehow anti social. It reminds me of a time about 10 years ago when Internet grocery shopping was all the buzz. You could go online, pick out your groceries, and have them delivered to your door. I was a big proponent. I could get up in the morning and do all my grocery shopping for the week in the space of time it took me to drink a cup of coffee.

"But you are cutting yourself off from the world!" friends cried. "What about the human interaction that you get from going to the store?" 

Eventually my friends admitted that they didn't actually talk to anyone at the grocery store except the checkout girl and maybe the guy at the meat counter and no one could recall the employee's names . . . no one had actually ever met and made a real-life friend at a grocery store . . .

To me, Facebook is relational in the way that a trip to a grocery store is an uplifting societal experience - not very.

One of the interesting things they postulated on the show was that Twitter is the essence of Myspace and Facebook stripped of all the illusions of friendship. According to them, if a person isn't a real friend to you in real life, they aren't a real friend with you on Facebook. Twitter is the reality of MS and FB.

But then again, some people meet and get married through the net. So who knows.

One thing is for sure, getting poked on FB is no substitute for getting poked in your living room. And that's all I have to blog about that . . .