Facebook or Twitter? Facebook and Twitter? Neither? YouTube?

Facebook I use fairly regularly, but it's not a big deal if I go days without checking it. Yes, I check in, but only when I'm with good people or doing something I would consider cool and/or exciting. I keep my FB totally separate from work and am friends with very few people that I work with. My private life and my work life rarely need to meet, if only to allow me to keep my sanity. I have hidden the feed of about 5 people. I've deleted 3 total since I've been on.

I like it simply for keeping up with what people I know are doing and mostly for those that I don't get to see often or those that I don't live close to. I'm friends with a lot of people from high school. I still live in the area, so it's like a mini reunion when I choose to read deep into the feed.

Twitter, honestly, I find way too cumbersome. It is just overwhelming. I follow mostly people that play sports or cover sports and mainly use it in the off season, just to feed my need for football. There is a lot of good information to be found there in the off-season when the papers are not writing 10 stories about it every day.

Don't use any others on a personal level and I use absolutely none of them from a work standpoint.

And I stay off of all of them when there is a big news story going on (like the election or the shooting in Connecticut.) Just too much bullshit for me to wade through. I'm more into it for the random crap that people are doing as I feel that it provides a needed break from the heavy shit that life is. I'm alright reading what random thing happened to someone at work or seeing a picture of the new shoes they just bought.

 

I'm on Facebook, but I find a very odd phenomenon with it. Many of my FB friends are also people I see and interact with everyday... But when I bring up something they posted on Facebook, they get all weird... Like what happens on FB stays on FB??

Example... I have one friend who's very liberal and posts all kinds of gun control stuff, pro-Obama stuff, etc. So if I run into her at my kid's school and offhandedly say, "Obama's holding a press conference in a few minutes on gun control ..." She looks at me like I have 2 heads and quite clearly doesn't want to discuss it. At all.

Social media is really screwing us up.

I'm not 'on' Twitter for the same reasons people have mentioned... Overwhelming... A time suck... Too much wrong info, bullshit... But I do read people's Tweets. I know someone who's covered Lance Armstrong extensively, and I was reading his page quite a bit this week. I'm sure I'll get on Twitter when I'm back working full time and need it for work.

Lets not forget sj.

If a big story breaks, this place is better with pertinent links and quickly culling bullshit than FB or Twitter, yes? You don't get the Morgan Freeman shit on here as much. Yes?

 

You could not be more right.

 

I like Facebook since it allows me stash contacts of people I may not need to reach on a daily or weekly basis, but I know where I can find them.
I've never tweeted, but I find it is a great source for getting information so I follow numerous journo sites. Don't follow actual people. Just the occasional fake girlfriend.

 

Yeah, Facebook is like people's private feelings, aired publicly. Look but don't talk.

So you can't talk about it, but you can have a Facebook war over it. Silent missiles.

 

Facebook is a worse place for arguments than a message board.

 

I was on Facebook for about a year, but it bummed me out too much when I was part of a friend's list purge. I was on Twitter for a month, but it seemed kinda silly. SJ is about as social as I get.

 

I have a Facebook account, and separate Twitter accounts for work and personal use.

The personal Twitter is locked; it's where I bitch about life and conservatives, curse, chat with relatively friends about inappropriate things and share my weekend activities. Even though it's personal and in theory not viewable, I rarely, if ever, mention work and only generally.

The professional Twitter account is open, and I've really started using it the past few months. New gig asks us to tweet out our links, and I use it to also RT stuff and post interesting links. I find a lot of good stuff on there.

 

I respectfully disagree.

Twitter is excellent for following breaking news, as long as you know how to sift through the BS. There's plenty here that doesn't add to the building of a story when breaking news happens.

 

The AP bulletin on Stan Musial moved at 7:53 last night.

The Stan Musial thread here began at 7:52.

I can't tell you how often that has happened, but it seems like a good bit to me.

 

I've found lately that stuff like that breaks on Twitter long before AP gets it. There was one last week -- Conrad Bain, maybe? -- where I was reading obits online a good 3 or 4 hours before the AP alert came out.

 

The utility of Twitter varies wildly from user to user to user because it depends entirely upon whom or what that user follows.