Relax, Facebook's Subscribe button won't kill Twitter

QuickMeme

By Helen A.S. Popkin

If you logged on to your Facebook account this morning still nursing a headache over the social network's Subscribe button rollout on Wednesday, you're not alone. Plenty of regular Joe n' Jane FarmVilles are having trouble wrapping our heads around what the Subscribe feature means exactly, and speculation by technorati that this could be Facebook's big Twitter killer further confuses things.

As on Twitter, you can now "follow" celebrities, journalists, and profiles of regular people who are just flat-out interesting. You no longer have to be "friends" to see their Profiles, and their "Public" updates will pop up in your Newsfeed. You can even comment on the Profiles you subscribe to, as long as the users you're following allow it via their settings. And like Twitter, Facebook will also offer suggestions on people to follow.

Nonetheless, Facebook and Twitter are still two totally different parties. The day Facebook figures out how to host a successful hashtag game in trending topics is the day Twitter has something to worry about.

Facebook, as we experience it, is about sharing things via an ongoing conversation with our entire circle of friends. That conversation happens through comments, photos, links to stories we want to talk about, quotes from favorite songs or the Bible, and lots of other things that go on for much longer than 140 characters.

Twitter, as most of us have come to understand it, is most celebrated as a "real-time news distribution network," as GigaOm's Mathew Ingram points out. "It functions almost exactly like an old-fashioned newswire does, and that makes it perfect for quick updates about news events like a revolution in Egypt or an earthquake in Japan."

Less celebrated, yet arguably as important to the health of Twitter's ecosystem, are users trying to out quip and/or connect with each over trending hashtags such as #nothingwrongwith or #IfTwitterWereHighschool, and notably, on "any given day reflect hateful, stereotypical and misogynistic mess."

These games, such as they are, aren't so much conversations as wolves howling to the pack, seeking confirmation that there's somebody else out there, without having to talk about it.

Twitter is also about @Lord_Voldemort7, an escaped Bronx Zoo Cobras, (hopefully) pre-adolescent girls threating each other with bodily harm to win the hearts of their beloved Justin Bieber (and the trolls who troll them), the delightful Q&A sessions occasionally held by dead Edgar Allen Poe, mocking Nature's wrath, Newark's hero mayor Cory Booker with the hotline for emergency tree removal, CAPS LOCK ABUSE, and the continued insistence of people who see something trending, and rather than going to an easy-reference analytics site such as What The Trend, continue to tweet,"OMG! WHY IS ______— TRENDING?"

All of this arrives in short, sharp bursts, with very little clutter. Good luck replicating that, Facebook.

The fact that you'll soon be able to update Twitter from Facebook, as TechCrunch's MG Siegler found in Facebook Subscribe's fine print, doesn't change the reason we will continue to use Twitter differently than we use Facebook. True, Facebook and Twitter increasingly offer similar features, as is the nature of business competition — and let's not forget Google+ and Tumblr and LinkedIn.

None of this changes the fact that we are a lazy species, and as the obligatory outrage that follows every Facebook change in either design or account settings continually proves, we super hate change. We are not the sort to change the way we do things, even because the one place that holds all our personal information wishes it to be so ... not immediately, anyway.

More on the annoying way we live now:

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.