I’ve started using Twitter very recently, and although it probably seems like the sort of thing I would have been all over years ago, I actually didn’t see what I would do with it. But now I do.

Twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/Twitter is a rich source of instant information. Stay updated. Keep others updated. It’s a whole thing.

I’m a big Facebook user (Maybe too much? Maybe it doesn’t matter?), although if the truth be told, I actually signed up by accident – back in the day, Facebook didn’t make the sign-up process terribly clear. Facebook used to be more about the networking of people, and the connections between them, then about the uploading of media, and more recently about the entering of information (and through comments and ‘liking’, the expression of opinion) by status updates, and now whole information pages on subjects. The more recent moves to encourage people to update their status in Facebook, to use their status to express opinions and broadcast information in real time have been a direct response to Twitter, which is all about broadcasting snippets of information in 140 characters or less.

Twitter by comparison is a ‘one trick pony’, but it’s a hell of a one trick pony. It’s fast and lean, and by it’s nature, always current. Facebook has been always been slow, because it’s relatively passive, people posting things on their own and other’s identically formatted home pages, and the feeds have been a jumble of different types of information to dig through. Too many features, to cater to all uses. Twitter just has that text box, and features to help you get the most from it.

I’m still getting a feel for how to use it but it definitely attracts a different type of user, using Twitter tweets in quite a different way to Facebook status updates. The interactions between users are different too; it’s all very flat and open. Your response to another user’s tweet is broadcast as part of your stream, visible to all.

I’ll continue using both, but I’ll be interested to see how I feel about them, and how I use them in a month or two. I suspect my use of both will change, tempered by who my fellow users of each are, and how they use each service. On that note, my Twitter account is: kevteljeur and if you’re reading this you probably have my Facebook account already…