Julian Bond at Voidstar has a great post on routing all your and your friend’s Status updates from Facebook to Twitter using Mario Menti’s excellent TwitterFeed service. Now, here’s my question. Is this not completely insane? Keeping up with Twitter feeds is hard enough. Adding Facebook status updates would hasten my “Twitter Bankruptcy”. At least with Twitter most people tend to keep in the back of their head that at least some of their key followers get Tweets sent direct to their mobiles via SMS. That means Twitter posts – which are also limited to 140 characters – tend to be much more concise than Facebook status updates, which can be even more throwaway that Tweets, if that doesn’t sound like an impossibility…
To illustrate, here’s is an example of my friends’ facebook status updates this morning:
XXXX XXXX is swapping one kind of chaos for another.
one minute ago
XXXX XXXX is pleased that there is finally some sunshine!
7 minutes ago
XXXX XXXX is back once more like the renegade master.
11 minutes ago
XXXX XXXX is in the other only caff on the A4.
30 minutes ago
XXXX XXXX is hoping the weather at 5am this morning holdup for the rest of the week for the folks back home.
44 minutes ago
XXXX XXXX is prodding Drupal with a sensitive implement.
49 minutes ago
XXXX XXXX is in the office.
50 minutes ago
XXXX XXXX is pleased to see that Mike Reid’s death is getting billed above Ingmar Bergman’s on BBC Online. That will probably change. Right? Runaround!
56 minutes ago
XXXX XXXX is back in the office.
57 minutes ago
XXXX XXXX is in the office.
about an hour ago
What I call ‘conversational status’ is a great way of just shooting the breeze, but the added element of mobile changes the character of the conversation to be pithier and often far more relevant to location.
Which reminds me of how one Twitter friend of mine recently said he was ‘pruning his Twitter friends’ down to just those in London. His Twitter conversation wouldn’t make any sense otherwise…