iZack.com

Facebook has can beat twitter, but first they need to find ways to filter out the noise.

Just like many of you, I made fun of Twitter constantly for months. I assumed it was just a place for 12 year olds and Ashton Kutcher to post meaningless updates about their boring lives. Finally, after months of media hype and pressure from a few tech savvy friends I decided to give it a try. I installed ‘Friendbar’ on my Firefox browser and signed into both my Facebook and Twitter names. Friendbar works like the CNN news ticker, only it lists status updates instead of news stories. At first the constant updates distracted me but soon I learned to tune them out until I needed a break.

I picked Friendbar because I felt like the fact it could pull Facebook information as well as Twitter meant it wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. I use Facebook all the time so having access to the updates might be a nice way to keep in touch with my friends. The nice thing about Friendbar is that you can shut off the Twitter or Facebook streams independently of each other.

I shut off the Facebook feed by day two. On Facebook, people are very focused on putting up silly statuses, quotes, and meaningless “I’m bored” messages. I was quickly annoyed with reading the Facebook noise– it was a waste of time usually. But I was incredibly surprised that my Twitter feed was far more interesting– people use it in a completely different way.

Regardless of what Twitter says, it’s not as much about ‘what are you doing this instant’ as it is about sharing information you think others can benefit from. It’s perfect for ultra-local news (following local restaurants, TV stations, and blogs is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of your town). It’s great for learning about new ideas (follow users like @mashable and @wired and you’ll learn something new every day). Don’t follow Ashton Kutcher.

Twitter’s biggest problem (besides being centralized and thus vulnerable to cyber-attack) is that it’s very spam-prone. Every day 2-3 people follow me that turn out to be spammers who post random updates between links to their products. There’s no real way to determine whether or not someone is Spammer or not by the email Twitter sends you (who cares how many followers/updates they’ve posted? WHO ARE THEY?). Instead you have to click through the email to their profile, and spend time trying to figure out if this user is actually providing information that is useful to me.

Facebook provides a much richer experience– if someone random adds me as a friend, I’m given their name immediately plus it’s easy to figure out if we have friends in common. The added depth to the profiles on Facebook makes it easy to determine who’s trying to spam me and who’s not.

Facebook needs to find a way to help funnel people away from posting garbage — “ohh I wish it was sunny”, and more towards useful– “Free ice-cream at Ben & Jerry’s today!”. First, Facebook should allow me to build my own feeds, selecting which friends updates I want included in each feed. That way if I wanted to see tech news, I could just check out ‘Tech News Friend Feed’.

Next, Facebook should find away to encourage people to tag their status updates as either personal/news/info (or whatever buckets they want to use). Give me the ability to easily follow only ‘news’ updates, or whatever I feel like at the time. Give me the ability to quickly change my newsfeed option for different posters so I can choose which of their activities I want to see in my feed. Give me the ability to use external programs (like Friendbar) to make those changes as well.