It takes a while to get the hang of Twitter. For a first time user, it is not obvous how to use Twitter effectively. I have a few friends who are somewhat active on Facebook, but have inactive Twitter accounts. This post is an attempt to compare Facebook and Twitter, show how Twitter is different, and hopefully convince some of my friends to be active Twitter users.
Facebook is a social network with a lot more features than the simple Twitter. Other than that, I see one major difference between the two. On Facebook one can add another user as a friend only with that user’s authorization. The default behavior on Twitter is to let anyone follow anyone else’s updates. This fundamental difference has resulted in me using these two social networks in two different ways. Majority of my friends on Facebook are my existing friends. I have made very few new contacts using Facebook. I use Facebook mainly to keep in touch with my existing friends. The conversation there is casual.
I use Twitter differently. Only a few of the people I follow on Twitter were known to me before.
On Twitter, I follow a lot of people in the software industry. Although I Tweet about personal activities, the focus of my tweets has mainly been on Software Engineering related topics. I find Twitter a great way to learn about software engineering or any other specific topics of interest.
There is a lot of interesting and well-known people on Twitter. Here’s a list of Twitter users worth following:
Well known personalities in the software industry
Other well known Twitter users I follow
Enrich your Twitter experience using TweetDeck
Although you can always use the simple web interface given by Twitter, you can have a richer experience by using a client like TweetDeck, which is my favorite Twitter client.
TweetDeck is an Adobe Air application and you can install it in a few minutes. It allows you to group tweets. For example you can have a group of favorite users, or have another group with tweets on Twitter that has the words “Unit Testing”. I find this very useful as it’s a great way to know what’s happening right now related to a particular key word.
