Ditto Devices (or, When Facebook Killed Twitter)

Disgusting amounts of things to do, and it’s gorgeous out to boot. Lots floating around in my head but for now, here’s a work-related post I just put up:

The blessing and the curse of all the cool social tools online these days is that there are so many of them. If I want to upload pictures, I have hundreds of options, but different sites serve different needs. If I want to do cool stuff with them, like geo-tag or use the photos on my blog, I’ll upload them to Flickr. If I want to seamlessly edit and upload my vacation pictures to a nice looking album, I’ll use Picasa and Google Photos. If I want the people in the pictures to actually look at them, I’ll tag them by name on Facebook (and in doing so, strike another blow at their employability).

As you can see, I’m yearning for cross-platform tools. Using ditto devices is time-consuming. And it’s always nice when we can cross something off the list.

Twitter was crowned the coolest thing of the year at SXSW, although there was considerable buzz that everyone just wanted to have a king. John Edwards and the BBC hopped on the early adopter bandwagon in their quests to stay relevant.

I was about to sign up for Twitter, but I couldn’t bear the thought of another web-based extension of my ego to constantly prune. I already have my Facebook universe, over thought AIM away messages, and an erratically updated personal blog. Factor in fringe social networking commitments like LinkedIn, fantasy baseball teams, and the rare but occasionally legitimate MySpace friend, and you start to wonder if it’s all worth it.

But late last Friday night, Facebook came to my rescue and eliminated the need for Twitter.

Facebook has had status updates for about a year now, with the prompt “Matt is _______”. Some find this prompt limiting (and similar to this post, a rich breeding ground for grammatical violations), but it does give you some direction. With their recent redesign, Facebook has made status updates much more prominent throughout the site, from your profile to the News Feed.

But what’s really new and cool about all of this is that you can easily text message your status updates to Facebook as well as retrieve your friends’ updates, profiles, messages, and cell phone numbers (assuming they trust you with all of this in the first place).

One major gripe I’ve heard about Twitter is the barrage of texts you start receiving when your contacts update their status. Facebook lets you subscribe to your friends’ status via their impressively functional SMS interface, but starts with the assumption that you don’t want a million texts from an automated service.

It’s possible that I’m underestimating Twitter’s feature set here, but there’s also the age-old tradeoff between a site’s features and whether or not people you know actually use it. How else do you explain MySpace’s continued relevance? My fellow Dittos aside, it would be pretty hard to convince my friends to sign up for Twitter. They, and increasingly everyone else ever born, are already on Facebook.

And what will I do with all the time I’ll save not updating Twitter? I don’t know, watch some Twittervision?