Twitter Hard News Article

I'll be the first to admit that when I first signed up for Twitter, I didn't get it. If anything it seemed like the bad version of Facebook to me. Where are all the extra goodies? Why can't you attach photos, videos and songs? Once I figured out how to do those things through other sites, it made a lot more sense to me. And today, I actually prefer Twitter over Facebook for 3 reasons. First twitter added an RSS Feed where instead of having your news feed blow up from random friends on facebook and having to go to a certain page to find what their saying, it chooses your most viewed friends/family and shows their important messages instead of junk from other people you would never want to talk to. Sam Ross and Kyle Jonas both say they like twitter because it’s easy and you can see what celebrities are doing from day to day on your newsfeed if you want. Second reason why I prefer twitter is you can send a direct message to a friend by just typing in “d username”, and sending to the Twitter mobile number. Your friend will receive a copy of the direct message through the site, and will also receive a copy of the message via e-mail. Likewise, your friend can respond to you with a direct message, and you will receive that on your mobile phone as long as you have enabled that default option. So Twitter makes it easy to communicate with your followers without having to broadcasting it to the rest of the world. You can also get celebrities tweets sent from a text directly to your cell phone. This is really useful when/if you don’t have internet on your phone and only text messages and there’s a way you can tweet back using just txt messages but I don’t know how to do that. Twitter thought of such a scenario, and added an RSS subscription option on every contact's page. I have subscribed to several of my friends' RSS feeds to make sure I don't miss anything. Sadly, most of my friends and family are still on the facebook bandwagon, and won’t switch over to Twitter. One of the things I didn't like about Twitter is now one of the things I like most about it. There are no games on Twitter, no special groups you can join, and the "about me" page is so much simpler. If you take a look at your Facebook timeline and how much of it is fills up your contacts scores on games and other random updates that really don't interest you. If I'm connected to someone that plays several rounds of a game, they can easily fill up my entire timeline in one day. Twitter forces us to be more concise, and to just publish what really matters! Sometimes it is hard to get your point across in 140 characters or less, but it also helps cut down on the inane chatter. I follow many people in various different fields, some of which appear to have too much time on their hands as well. I'm thankful that some of those folks only have 140 characters at a time at their disposal. So those are the biggest reasons that I prefer Twitter to Facebook.
-Derek Schatz
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