Why I divorced Facebook from Twitter
Updated on 27 March 2009
I admit it, I'm Channel4 News's technology correspondent and I've only just got into Twitter.
The whole world seems to have gone Twitter mad this month and I'm not ashamed to admit that I've joined the rest of the sheep.
The micro-blogging service always seemed rather narcissistic to me, a little like the first real blogs that were around back at the start of the web.
I played around with it last year, and actually posted my first "tweet" when I met the site's co-Founder Biz Stone (@Biz). Amazingly it said "Odd".
Actually I lie, I did try the site three days earlier and posted "doesn't understand this" as I struggled to get my head around Twitter in order to accurately introduce Biz at a lecture I was hosting at the University of Oxford.
Since then I tried marrying up my Twitter and Facebook profiles, so that any update I made to my Twitter automatically became my Facebook status.
But suddenly, by doing so my Facebook stopped being a rather intimate, personal affair and it became polluted.
My grandma, who's an avid Facebook user, was pretty stern. "top posting all this rubbish on Twitter. Who cares?" she replied to a post I made a tech conference.
There, I'd challenged an audience of "cloud" enthusiasts to describe the sector in less than 140 characters: "Dacloud lets you throw away your pc and just use a socket in the wall."
But my Grandma quite rightly pointed out to me later that Facebook is more about photographs and relationships than work.
So I divorced the two profiles and by doing so I suddenly got Twitter.
Yesterday I spent the day immersed in the while I was researching some future reports and working on an article about the lack of security within Parliament.
It was rather fun to discuss the news in geek speak, re-tweet (redistribute) news from other sources and attempt to steal ideas from my opposite number at the BBC, Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147), without worrying that it would confuse my real friends on Facebook.
I decided that Twitter should be for work and Facebook for fun although I realise this might not be the case for everyone.
I personally think that there are real business uses for Twitter particularly for the media.
Even as I write this, I'm watching really interesting news that I haven't yet seen on the main newswires tweeted and re-tweeted across the service.
But there is still quite a lot of rubbish out there. Perhaps the real business successes that will spring from Twitter will be the companies that are springing up eager to filter out the gems from the junk.
I'm still perfecting my Twitter speak but follow me at @benjamincohen and help me out.
