Which is better for social networking: Twitter or Facebook?

 By:Jon Berwick

With Social Networks such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter growing by thousands every day, everyone is wondering one thing. Which one is truly the best out of all of them? To compare them on a smaller scale, one may be more efficient than the others depending on what you are using it for. Opinions may also vary from person to person depending on what they look for in a social networking site. In my opinion, I think Facebook is the best social networking site overall.

The first and main thing social networking sites are used for, is to keep you connected with friends,family, co-workers, and acquaintances, literally creating a social network, as the name suggests. While all of these sites do this, Facebook does it with the most easiest to use interface out of them all. Your news feed shows everything people you choose to be friends with are doing at that time period, whereas with Twitter, you only get to see status updates, and not what games your friends are playing, who they are dating, or who they are becoming friends with. Facebook gives you the easiest way of seeing what your friends are up to, without having to search all over different places on the site to find out.
A second factor that Facebook excels over other social networking sites in, is picture sharing. Pictures not only show up on your news feed when uploaded if the owner chooses for them to, they are on the owner's profile for you to go check out whenever you please. On Twitter you have to use a different site to upload pictures to, and even then the pictures aren't really on Twitter, they just link you to the other site. Twitter also doesn't have a collection of pictures for a person like Facebook does with its picture albums.
The easiest form of communication that any social networking site has, is the instant messaging feature. Facebook has an IM program, Twitter doesn't. To have a conversation with someone on Twitter you have to reply to each other's tweets, which is almost like sending a message on Facebook. With Facebook all you have to do is open your IM and click on the person you would like to talk to and your message pops up on their screen instantly. Another thing is that IMs stay between you and the person you are IMing, where as with Twitter almost anyone can see your conversation using their conversation methods.
Every social networking site has its conveniences and uses that make it better than other social networking sites depending on what you need out of it. Overall, I believe Facebook is a better option for an overall social networking experience though. Just a few examples are its superiority in ease of use, picture sharing, and instant messaging. The choice of which one to use is your own..
What good is Twitter? Who uses that? Who really cares? Facebook is the ultimate monopoly on social networking. Facebook is the dictionary definition of social networking. I just tweeted about drinking my cup of coffee, but my friend just Facebook'd his entire vacation to Europe.
As of now, I feel Twitter is very limited in its capabilities. It is primarily good for short blurbs about one topic or another. Usually the comment is a response to a prior tweet known as a "retweet". Facebook on the other hand is all encompassing. Facebook allows a user to create the story of their life, and display it online for the world to see. Facebook allows you to create photo albums and videos to accompany wall posts. Friends can be tagged in pictures, videos, and comments so you know who was hanging out with who on that oh so special night. Don't remember who Susan Q was from the night before? Now she is tagged in your picture and that maybe regrettable experience comes back to you so quickly.
Facebook allows you to kill time. Once they allowed for applications to be created, Facebook social games have taken to the skies. Look at one of the top Facebook applications, Farmville. Which one of your friends has not requested your help to plow their farms? Many games of midnight poker have gone on against several hundred thousand other people hiding behind their computers betting on the river card. These are only some things that Twitter could dream to incorporate in the coming years.
What network allows you to sell things on a local marketplace? Facebook! What network allows you to answer the most random quizzes about your friends? Facebook! While on Twitter you may be able to tweet a good word about a local business, there is another network that allows the business to create splash pages, offer coupons, allow comments, create links to their other pages, and upload photos about their products. Have you guessed where this is going? Facebook!
Twitter does have a great search engine though. You could potentially find the hottest trends on Twitter based on the most recent tweets, but when you are on Facebook you already know these trends because all your friends' status messages are about those items. When it comes down to it, Facebook is Twitter times one thousand. Unless Twitter has a major overhaul, Facebook will always be the greatest social networking site on the web.