Separate Twitter from Facebook

I became a member on Twitter shortly after they opened their doors to the public. I’d heard a lot of buzz and rushed over to see what it was all about. It took me approximately 5 minutes to realize that I didn’t know what the heck was going on. Two months later, I revisted Twitter and made my first post:

Nothing profound. I had no friends and no followers. I was just posting about what was on my mind. Fast forward 2 yrs and nothing much has changed. I don’t have legions of followers and I’m still posting whatever happens to be passing through my thoughts at the moment.  There are some who put on a front and do nothing but try to impress others with their Tweets, I am not one of those. On Twitter, I just am which doesn’t bring me many fans.. nor is it intended to do so. But I digress..

Back in Septemeber ’06 Facebook opened it’s gates to the masses- just as MySpace was enjoying it’s peak of popularity. I’d already decided that MySpace was a gigantic explosion of  dumb and not sure what to expect, I signed up for Facebook. For the longest time, I didn’t get that either (recognize a pattern here? I might just be a slow learner). Regardless, I played around and invited a few of my friends to join. We quickly embraced the banality and took some online quizzes  trying to figure out which amongst us was the most NSFW with our umm.. behavior. *cough*  However, aside from some random sillyness, Facebook didn’t offer me much and I quickly lost interest.

Twitter, on the other hand started to appeal more and more to me. It would be almost a year before I had conversations with people I’d met in real life but it allowed me to reach out and interact with anyone and everyone on earth. I mean, how cool is it to be able to share your actual thoughts with just about everyone who might be interested. That, in a nutshell, is Twitter: your ability to send a text message to the world. Something about this appealed to me. Not just the broadcasting aspect of it but more the receiving end. I found myself more often than not hitting F5 on the Twitter public timeline and digging around to find some of the most amazing (albeit brief) insight from people around the globe. Striking to me that I could be let in on snippets of other people’s worlds and that I could share my experiences as well. Apparently I was not the only one who would feel the same way.

Fast forward 2 years. MySpace is quickly becoming a thing of the past while Facebook and Twitter have both taken off to astronomical heights. Twitter has basically stayed fairly close to its roots while Facebook has moved slowly away from its starting point and tried to mimic the best of what Twitter and MySpace have had to offer. At their cores though, there are a couple of distinct differences:

Twitter:  Text messaging the world.

Facebook: Connecting to your offline friends, online.

That’s not to say that the two can’t overlap. They often do and this, my friends, is where I fell prey to the lure of convenience. Seeing that I had 2 social networks with which I was spending an increasing amount of time, I decided to simplify my online existence and allow for all of my Twitter updates to automatically sync with my Facebook account. I did this through the Facebook Twitter Application. Enabling this Facebook App meant that everytime I would post to my Twitter account, it would automatically update my Facebook account.  This served it’s purpose for a while, but never in the best way. Though my Twitter friends never had anything to complain about, people I was connected with on Facebook were constantly faced with a barrage of seemingly random garbage. I mean, when the average user on Facebook sees “RT @buttmonkey hell yeah, spermicide! #michaeljackson” .. there’s really not much they can do with that. It can be, and is for most, a foreign language. What was I thinking? All of my English friends don’t want to and won’t benefit from my Chinese posts!

I would like to take this moment and apologize. I was merely looking for an easy way out. I only wanted to simplify my online presence, not make it more burdensome for myself as well as others.

Well, friends.. it’s taken me a long time to realize the error of my ways. I’ve considered for months now separating my Twitter and Facebook accounts and mostly I didn’t do it because I figured if I did, that my Facebook account would lie dormant and sad, like a little orphaned child left to die in the gutters while his parents ran away to play on some beach. This weekend though, I pulled the trigger and I’m very glad that I did.

If you’ve found yourself in the same boat and you’ve been thinking about amputating your Twitter feed from your Facebook profile, here’s how to do it:

1. log into facebook (duh)
2. go to settings, hover & choose application settings
3. from the drop down menu choose, show: authorized
4. find twitter on the list

5.click the “x”

6. choose:  Remove
7. the end

If you do decide that you want to have some connection betwen Twitter and Facebook then I highly suggest you try out the Selective Twitter Status Facebook Application:

This application allows you to update your Facebook account from your Twitter feed but only when you use the #fb hashtag at the end of your Tweets. If you don’t include #fb then your Tweet stays on Twitter. Additionally this application allows you to preface your Facebook status updates with a custom message if you wish (ie. “Posted on Twitter:”), which is pretty nifty. The #fb will appear on your Tweets, but not on your Facebook page. All in all a much better way to stay selectively separate.

Most recent posts by Greg Habermann

• University of Akron Google Analytics Class - September 21st, 2011
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• YouTube Insight - Advanced Techniques with Online Video Analytics - January 4th, 2011
• Get Started with YouTube Insight – Online Video Analytics - December 23rd, 2010
• Getting Started with Online Video Analytics - December 16th, 2010