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I used to describe twitter to non-users as “Facebook status, but just that and nothing else”. But that description is not that good and doesn’t impart the real value of Twitter.

Twitter is much more than just status, as it seems to connect people emotionally. I know much more about friends of mine on Twitter than friends on Facebook. Or in real life for that matter. I know who’s having a shitty day and who’s not. Who’s in a playful mood and who’s drinking and who’s working. I don’t know who’s getting laid, but give it time.

My real life friends I have no idea what’s going on with them at all. Unless they/we call or email and everyone is too busy to do that, so I only find out when I see them, when we have plans. Which these days (wedding, beddings (kids) and buidlings (house moves)) is greatly reduced.

On the other hand shooting a few 140 character updates doesn’t take time out of the day, and once you start using twitter actually enhances the day. It enhances it because of the interaction between twitters.

It’s just this tiny little thread that shifts it from being a flat medium like facebook status to a social medium. It’s that difference that connects you to people rather than positions you as mere observer. And whilst the observation thread is nice, by itself it starts to die as it isn’t self sustaining. Where as the observation with interactivity grows and gets stronger. |t means I become a participant in my friends lives occasionally even if that participation is just Stuart getting coffee

I guess Twitter is more a small version of Facebook wall than a version of Facebook status. Of course where it really kicks Facebooks arse is where Facebook is trying to be a walled garden (come to our site come to our site come to our site) Twitter is just a node to be accessed.

I can consume and publish via the web, via IM, via text, via applications (I ♥ Twitterific), via via via via via. Which means it’s both very easy to publish, to observe and to interact with my friends on Twitter. And because it’s non time consuming (I can wack out 140 chars in a few seconds) and I can use it anywhere and any time it’s a running constant in my life.

Compare that to Facebook, which only offers an RSS feed. So when someone has something about me in their Facebook status don’t even see it. Plus because twitter has no other shit it does I only follow people I want to. Where Facebook is kinda of a storage system for people I know, people I sort of know and people who I want to sleep with.

I know lots of people bored with Facebook. Twitter on the other hand is part of my daily life.

I just wish more real friends would use it. As it really does connect people (especially busy people) socially and emotively.

... on facebook that is. And not you of course. Obviously you are really important to me. It's the other people who aren't.

I talked about this a while ago, and Meg is also talking about how Facebook needs to add relevance to the contact list..

I'm cross posting my comment on Meg's site here because I think my solution is rather nifty, and the comment I left at Meg's was pretty much blog length.

I agree with Meg, although I see it less as a venn diagram and more as a an onion. I should have drawn diagrams too. Basically I see friends ranking outwards from really important to me, to vaguely important to basically archived.

Whilst your groups idea gets the end result, I don't think it would work. People on FB don't really treat groups that way, and it involves too much work, both for the person settings things up, as well as for the other people. It also breaks down the venn diagrams of of overlapping connections, which I think is a critical part of how facebook/linkedin etc work.

What you really need is a simple, or near automated way to do this with minimal effort. Easier than the "how do I know this person" they currently have, which whilst interesting has very little value, and is mostly wrong because hard wired tick boxes cannot account for enough situations.

What I would see as a solution (which admittedly only came to me when reading your blog) is an importance bar. On the left site is "really important people" (wives, close friends, etc) and on the right side is "people I really can't be bothered with, more of a reference if I need it" (that guy I knew at school, my now married ex, etc)

Every person then needs two variables. A placement and a modifier. The placement is where you stick them on the bar. The modifier is a 1 or 2 step shift up or down the bar based on how you communicate with them.

Then when your friend a person, it gets shown below on this bar. A couple of key friends could appear on the bar as reference points. You then slide this person up or down the bar to the point where their relevance to you is. Really quick and easy and not much effort to set up.

Then in setting you can control how much information about you is revealed based on the bar position. You can also give more or less control to facebook to modify people's position automatically based on how much you communicate with them, and poke them, and view their profile etc. Information delivered to you about other people is obviously prioritised towards their importance on the bar.

I think this fairly accurately reflects how we view people in life. I think it's very little effort to do, to deliver context and simplifying things, as well as being able to dynamically change things based on activity. It also retains and holds interconnection information between contacts as well as adding too it.

I now have over 250 contacts in FB. Way more than I can manage. I suspect most people have this problem. If Facebook doesn't improve this aspect of their platform, they will start suffering from it. If they aren't already.

Whilst I'm on about Facebook, I just commented this over on Bobbies site. However I have been meaning to blog on this for ages, so I'm cross posting it here.

Bobbie: But the real problem isn’t that these people aren’t my friends; it’s that I actually have many different flavours of friend, but online services only use the crudest methods to determine a relationship between two people.

This really sums it up for me.

Facebook (for example) basically assigns the same value to everyone I know. However as Bobbie says, not all friends are created equal. I want to be able to tage, flag, group or whatnot people. Which should roughly reflect how I view people in general (or offline if you will)

Facebook can then adjust to reflect these different groups and how much data I want pushed at me from the groups or how interested I am in the groups. Even in the groups it would be interesting to see FB using the attention data of who I communicate with more.

So an example grouping for me could be, in descending order of value

1. Close Friends
2. Friends
3. Friends of Friends
4. Acquaintances
5. People I once knew (school, work)
6. Groups/Bots/Not Real people
7. My exgirlfriend, her new husband and their wedding pictures

Then instead of getting updates from people I knew once a long time ago and really am not all that bothered by what they had for lunch I can have my updates more focused on the people I care about more. As the number of friends and connections increases, managing this is vital to the social networks.

The good social networks will find ways to manage this easily and without much effort. The poorer ones will want to much data input.

And this applies to all social networks, and Twitter and LinkedIn especially could benefit from this. So could Flickr. Facebook just makes it easier to see how the value of the connections is so important as in real life interactions we can see the same connections directly.

A "smart relationships" interface like Apples smart playlists would be interesting.

Then I can have a people group set as "Girls, flagged with 'I like', currently in a relationship, notify me on relationship status change"

So I've started putting adverts on the site. However if I have done this right you shouldn't see them. That's because you are important.

If however you are seeing an advert, you are not as important. You are probably one of the unwashed massed brought in via Google and I'm trying to milk you for all you are worth. Which is apparently about $1.51 for every thousand of you.

I tried Google Adsense on my most heavily trafficked page for the last 10 weeks or so, just to see how it would do. I get about 15%-20%* of all my traffic on this page alone so I thought it would be a good test. In the 10 weeks I made a little over $17, which whilst not going to pay for a Ferrari did mean that by rolling this out to more pages I could probably pay my hosting bill at the very least.

However I didn't want to ruin the site experience. So drawing on some thoughts around relationship marketing (you can tell I have a new job right), I have now rolled this out in such a way, that my regulars wont see any adverts, nor will they be seen on any of the recent pages (that might be of the most interest).

So currently, adverts will ...

• only appear on pages that are over 200 days old


• only for people who have visited 10 times or less and haven't left a comment

I don't want to ruin the look and feel of sevitzdotcom with adverts all over the place. So regular visitors and and people who comment wont see adverts**. However the greater unwashed who arrive at Google and look at posts 6 months and older will see them. I think this is a fair way of doing things, and I can tweak the parameters as I see fit.

Anyway would be curious to know what you think. I'll share the code at some point too, when I can convert it into PHP. Hopefully none of you lot will see adverts and we're all fine and dandy.

[UPDATE] I have made 35c today alone. How awesome is that. (It sounds a little but that's off 122 impressions which a CTR of 1.64, a 6 times better rate than my most trafficked page mentioned above.