Facebook is the new Twitter

Facebook has a rather trivial feature which nevertheless sees a lot of usage - user status.

The idea is that you finish off a sentence that starts "Andrew is..." and then other people can see what you typed. Looking through my friends, I see "at work", "older but no wiser", "eternally busy" and "waving his arms around like a mad bugger playing on his wii.". My own own currently reads "Andrew is the Way, the Truth and The Light." Which is all very fun and jolly - and it's frequently great fun to log in and see what people have been up to.

What Facebook have done in the recent redesign is make all of the status updates available on one page. Which is nice, but still not quite amazing. What's amazing is the link on the right hand side "subscribe to status updates", which is an RSS feed of the updates.

Which means you can then subscribe to them through LJ. And see what all your friends are up to, in teeny updates, from your friends page.

Now _that_ is a nice piece of functionality. It's just replicated exactly what Twitter does, only as a teeny part of the overall functionality, rather than needing a complete website just to do that one thing.

As you can probably tell, I rather like it.

In praise of triviality

octopoid_horror very reasonably asks - what's the difference between a livejournal update and a facebook update. And it's an interesting one.

The problem with LJ is that people frequently feel bad posting multiple entries, or indeed anything at all unless they think other people will be interested. There's a worry that we'd be annoying other people, or being dull. And so many people feel like LJ is either work (because they have to write something _good_) or yet another thing that makes them look dull.

With Facebook, every time you log in there's a question sitting there on the right hand side, nagging at you. "Andrew is..." and it's the work of a moment to type in something trivial. Maybe something funny, maybe something serious, maybe something personal, maybe something meaningless. But it's there. Waiting. And so very easy to fill in.

Frequently I'll see status updates from people that haven't posted to LJ in months. And while I _love_ long entries with interesting ideas in them, I'm also fascinated by the little personal tidbits that pop up in Status updates. They make me happy in entirely different ways.