I have MORE contacts on Twitter — by a good margin — than Facebook. My Twitter contacts seem to have MORE to say, not less, than my Facebook contacts.

Even so, I like Twitter better, by a country mile. But as has been said, a big part of it is not feeling obliged to try to follow everything. I just catch whatever’s being said when I log in, and check in on personal messages. Then I get back to whatever I was doing; as opposed to Facebook, where I think people tend to get caught in the quicksand a little more, and lose productivity.

I’d add that I think Facebook is terrible software. The things I am most interested in, on the rare occasion that I log in, are really difficult to find (like the “notifications” button.) Moreover, there are way TOO MANY things. It reminds me of Windows vs. Mac. Specifically, the time that Bill Gates was baffled by Apple’s new 6-button remote control; why would anyone want THAT instead of the Windows 144-button remote? Don’t people want choices???

Well, no. I don’t really want to LEARN my social networking platform (what’s the difference between a note and a blog? What are the rules and regs about whose photos I can comment on? Where do I go to adjust frequency of updates? etc.) I just want to USE it.

All that said, I find Facebook to be pretty indispensible, at the moment. Because there are people I want to stay in touch with, who use it all the time. It’s my hope that they’ll all migrate to Twitter someday, just like most of the people I want to stay in touch with moved from Myspace to Facebook. But, that may be a pipe dream, since they really reflect a very different way of approaching things. Facebook was “better” than MySpace by almost any measure; I’m not sure you could say the same about Twitter vs. Facebook. On a certain level, they’re just “different.”

Admittedly, I can see how it would be useful to have asymmetric “friendships” or more intuitive graduated access control, but I’m wholly unsympathetic to Molly’s plight. If she found the girl distasteful in high school, what was the thought process that led her to confirm her “friendship”? Sounds to me like Molly is simply realizing that being the venerable FB-good-time-gal isn’t fun when you come home with friend-feed-gonorrhea.

I reject that dismissing a friend request (or leaving it in the queue) is a big deal. And if it is, it’s not your responsibility as the rejector to manage someone else’s feelings. I think the worst you could say is that FB encourages thoroughly co-dependent hand wringing about someone else’s shit.

I think you’re right, that facebook’s use of the word “friend” makes saying no a bit tougher, but I’m not sure that everyone would be so blase about being unfollowed. This doesn’t seem to be built into the architecture so much as built into the norms around using twitter, which while strong, haven’t really been tested by a massive influx of every fucking person like Facebook has. I think the same thing is true about the character limit: it’s not the length of FB posts that is annoying, it’s the frequency, which again, is governed by twitter’s norms.

The strength and persistence of those norms is really fascinating to me. Ian pointed out a while ago that most people use a real photo of themselves on twitter, which is kind of astonishing.