In what ways is Twitter better/different than Facebook?

[Dragon]

I've heard of Twitter for over a year now, but I haven't bought into the hype so I still don't have an account on Twitter. I'm still ignorant to what Twitter really is meant for. How is Twitter better than Facebook or what features make it unique from Facebook?

[Joel]

Twitter and facebook are two fundamentally different things.

Twitter places a limit on the amount of text a "tweet", or status update, can have. The purpose of twitter is just to tell others what you are doing, reading, viewing, thinking, etc. in a very short amount of words. The focus is not on comprehensive "profiles" as it is with facebook. Twitter is basically JUST the "status update" portion of facebook.


Twitter's advantage is that you can find out about news and "trending topics" very quickly as many people will often update as soon as something happens in the world. Facebook is a little more lethargic in that matter.

Facebook is typically better for having conversations with friends, planning events or storing photos and memories.

[Cameron]

Its for people that have big enough egos to think that people care about what they are doing, so they post like 5 word sentences explaining what they are doing every minute of the day.

[c0nfuted]

I gave Joel a "Thumbs Up." He has a pretty good answer.

As for the limit on the number of characters you can have in a tweet (message), it' s because of the Short Message Service (SMS) Standard. SMS was designed to work within specific limitations of mobile phone devices at the time. So 140 bytes (160 7-bit characters) was the limit.

Besides, it only takes 95 characters to say "ATTENTION BURGLARS: I'm gone for the weekend. Coast is clear - you can steal my plasma TV, now!" That leaves 75 characters to say things like "DARN I'm stupid! But you knew that, right?"

Arizona man sends tweet, house gets robbed (June 8th):
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10260183-83.html

Celebrities On Twitter Invite Burglary, Says Study (June 16th):
http://www.limelife.com/blog-entry/Celeb...46133.html

But people on twitter aren't alone - you can do exactly the same thing on Facebook or Myspace. Uh, be stupid, that is:
http://mashable.com/2009/08/27/facebook-burglary/

Search Google, there's a lot more (2,120,000 results)...
http://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+burglary

Go - Tweet away!

[Keith Z]

Simple and short way of explanation : twitter is microbloging so it wont consume more time its rapidly growing, almost people can keep in touch with just single line, easy to use even in hand held device like iphone etc and its becoming now boom in promotion activity also