This, by itself, is only slightly interesting; as with any technology — dishwashers, automobiles, air conditioning, telephones, TV, cell phones — there are always folks who’ll find reasons not to use it, for reasons ranging from the pragmatic, to the quixotic, to the perverse. And inevitably, those refusers will diminish as the technology evolves from novelty to utility to necessity.

(Also, I note that some of the Facebook refusers profiled were merely lazy, since instead of taking a principled stance and quarantining themselves from the people and information transmitted via online social networks, they simply relied on their non-boycotting friends to relay the information for them.)

To me, the interesting bit is the idea that people who aren’t on Facebook exist in a kind of un-person / non-entity state of being, and how that represents a radical change in attitude from the pre-computer era — a paradigm shift, sea change, or gamechanger (depending on which era’s jargon you prefer), brought about by the dominance of digital media and interconnected networks in general, and the ubiquitious convenience of online search in particular.

My thinking goes a little something like this:

Previously, if something didn’t have a physical presence, it didn’t really exist. Now, if something doesn’t have an online presence, it doesn’t really exist.

Consider: In pre-Internet days, the only presence was physical, so we only really thought we knew someone or something if we could see, talk to, and touch it directly. Anything outside that model — early virtual relationships  like BBS, amateur radio, telephone party line, or pen pals — wasn’t quite “real.”

Nowadays, knowing something really means the ability to find, store, and send it online.

Looking at the example of the Facebook refusers, we see people who don’t participate don’t have presence, even in those platforms where the online interactions are strongest when reinforcing offline relationships. (I’ve mentioned a related theme before, “When you don’t post, you don’t exist.”)

More importantly, it holds true for goods and knowledge that exist as physical items in the real world — say, old books that haven’t been scanned in yet; a property record that isn’t in an accessible database; or an antique that hasn’t been documented online: Because they’re not findable via Web search or interlinked database, because they don’t have presence online, we can’t know then or even know about them unless we venture offline, so they don’t really exist.

Now, sure, there have are plenty of things that didn’t and don’t really “exist” — economies, trust, reputations, patriotism, love, etc. — but have always been convenient for us to act like they do. But here I’m talking about things that actually do exist as physical items in the real world, but because we’re cut off from them in our daily, digital, online lives, they’re out of the loop.

This is, of course, not due to any changes in intrinsic value (to the extent that such a beast exists), but represents a shift in attitude — it boils down to what we consider “visible” and “knowable.”

Anyway, just a thought. Please leave a real comment below.

Two recent cases in point:

* Project ‘Gaydar’: This Boston Globe article looks at some MIT researchers who analyzed Facebook friending patterns and figured out that they could pretty accurately predict which men were gay, even if they didn’t list it in their profile. They did this by looking at the subjects’ Facebook friends; apparently, gay men have more gay male friends than straight men, so by looking at someone’s followers and plugging them into a computer model, they could infer who was gay. (It didn’t work as well with bisexuals and lesbians.)

The reason it works is that people with similar interests tend to cluster. Call it birds of a feather flocking together, or guilt by association. Either way, it shows another way that indirect information — in this case, the company you keep — can be used to reveal more information about you than you might have intended, especially when that information is accessible online.

(A further example comes from another researcher cited in the article who used predictive models, combined with follower information, to predict political affiliation based on music preference. Again, while it may be an old stereotype to associate, say, the Grateful Dead with progressives, and while you might miss a few outliers — like noted Republicans who are Deadheads — the ability to cross-check against the stated preferences of your online friends, over whom you have little control — is a new thing to worry about.)

Although I’m sure many audience research, political polling, and marketing types are salivating at the possibilities, any privacy-valuing individual should take pause. Though the logical answer — don’t post information under your own name, which basically means don’t post anything — seems pretty draconian. [link via Slashdot]

* Online Compliments Can Haunt You, Too: From the Wall Street Journal, a lawyer who represents corporations in employment cases recommends they tell employees not to post recommendations for laid-off co-workers on job networking sites (like LinkedIn), on the theory that if someone is let go for cause, but gets good online recommendations from co-workers, it might be used as legal fodder.

You know the mom-ish advice — if you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all. I guess we can amend that to simply say, “Don’t say anything at all.”

Online job recommendations are strange beasts — as Jeremiah Owyang notes, their value is already dubious, since people are only likely to ask for a recommendation when they think they’ll get a good one, but this is a new twist. Most of us are hesitant to give a less-than-shining recommendation if the other person can see it; take away the ability to give a good recommendation, and all that’s left is the mushiest of litigation-proof recommendation letters, or simply a very corporate verification of employment dates.

It’s easy to say, “Just stop posting stuff online,” though in practice, it’s getting to be like saying “so just don’t drive” or “just don’t talk on the phone” — you can do it, but the cost is increasing.

Got a comment (that’ll add to your online body of work, possibly lending more insight into your personality and purchasing habits)? Leave a comment.

The first event is that I started playing Mafia Wars this month (my excuse that I’m merely doing it to evaluate online gaming mechanics and explore ways to use them to influence real-world behavior is running out of credibility, since I’m up to level 57 now).

Now, Mafia Wars is notorious for transmitting lots of invitations and notifications to your Facebook network. I try to avoid burdening non-players with unsolicited invitations (after all, “Chronic Inviter” is one of CNN’s 12 most annoying types of Facebookers); however, sending notifications to fellow players is unavoidable, since it’s baked into gameplay and the only way to really avoid them is to stop playing.

The second event is an actual event… I’ve got a major milestone high school reunion coming up this year (20 years, for those keeping count), so I’ve recently experienced a lot of followed by/following activity involving folks with whom I’ve had little to no contact over the past few decades.

The convergence comes into play thusly: A bunch of those high school classmates, most of whom I haven’t talked with (or even thought about) for 10 or 20 years are now linked to me on Facebook, and are also part of my Mafia Wars “crew,” which means I’m getting a lot of their game status updates (and they’re getting mine).

This means that I’m constantly prompted to think about these folks, some of whom I’d forgotten, a few of whom I didn’t really know all that well in the first place, and maybe even a couple whom I’d actively suppressed memories of in the intervening years.

It’s very strange.

The nature of the Facebook Mafia Wars notification interaction is pretty lightweight in the first place, not to mention oftentimes very odd when looked at in a non-game context — a typical message will go something like, “Don Corleone needs your help on the Exterminate a Rival Family job.”

As an automatically-generated system notification, it’s depersonalized, so it’s different from other types of communications used in online social grooming behaviors (see more about Twitter chatter’s use in this role) — any other significance comes strictly from the recipient. The Mafia Wars notification just serves to keep bumping awareness of the sender back to the top.

In terms of generating other, more significant communications between participants — while the game notifications could theoretically serve as a conversation catalyst or icebreaker, it’s really incidental to gameplay, and I haven’t seen very much of it. In the Mafia Wars game context, deeper communications aren’t integrated into gameplay — they aren’t necessary, and might not even be desirable (looking at the kinds of trash-talking that comes up on other social gaming networks).

So, despite any additional baggage that I’m attaching to these interactions, they really are pretty compartmentalized into this separate Mafia Wars universe.

It’s still odd, though.

Anyway, if you’ve got a perspective on how in-game notifications or other game-related messaging influences your online and real-world social interactions (for instance, let’s hear from some of you Lexulous players), please leave a comment.

This week I attended an event in Palo Alto in the old Facebook headquarters building. It wasn’t your typical event, but it was definitely a good one. Organized by the fbFund, this event featured several great thought leaders in the realm of social media and startups, including renowned author of The Facebook Era Clara Shih, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Stage 2 Consulting head Jeremy Toeman and Microsoft BizSpark “marketing dude” Jacob Mullins.

What is the fbFund? According to the Facebook website, it is a group of developers selected by Facebook to help innovate and create unique social experiences relating to Facebook Connect and they offer seed funding ranging from $25k  to $100k investments along with mentorship to help accomplish this goal.

So what’s so important about this meeting, you might be asking? Well it’s because since it was organized by a group dedicated to helping developers, that means also startups (aka small businesses), right? The goal of this particular meeting was to answer some really fundamental questions:

- When’s the right time to launch?
- Hire a PR person in-house, outsource, or do it themselves?
- How much should you invest in marketing vs product development?
- Right mix of social media marketing vs more “traditional” channels?

Here are some of those answers.

With over 250 million users and 1 million developers in over 180 countries, Facebook marketing is becoming a really big part of garnering new business. According to The Facebook Era author Clara Shih, sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have changed the paradigm from the world wide web to the world wide web of people and even user expectations have changed. No longer are you simply banking on a “spray and pray” policy to work. Instead, the way to do business with your customers is to understand who they are. It’s all about having targeted marketing – they expect you to know about their problems, issues and to show them what you can do to help them. Let’s be customer-centric, not product-centric.

Shih brought up an interesting phenomenon during her presentation – that being of transitive trust. What is this? With social media, it means that the probability of you trusting someone would increase based on the marketer having the trust of a common person you trust. So if a guy from Salesforce.com is interested in reaching out to your demographics, they might seek out a trusted source you follow and then you might be more inclined to at least listen to what they have to say (whether there is a transaction is entirely up to you).

Moreover, Shih also believes that with this paradigm shift in promotion, so to has there been a change in how we communicate to our customers. With the advent of the telephone, it was a 1:1 ratio where businessmen talks to customer. Then with web 1.0 (static websites, email marketing, etc.), the world changed to be 1:many. Now with web 2.0, you’re now looking at many:many. Ultimately, Shih believes we’re in a new age where Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn has forced it to be a ratio of everybody-to-everybody.

In a tie-in back to Facebook, Shih’s accomplishments include creating the first Facebook application integrated with her previous stint at Salesforce.com. Just how integrated was it with social media? It had a Facebook portion that allowed you to link up with other people you know on the platform and employs transitive trust. Also, it allows you to better target any sales through LinkedIn’s friend-to-friend network and lastly works on customer service through Twitter…all in Salesforce’s system.

A key point made throughout the afternoon was that you don’t have to work with big agencies to promote your brand. Instead, it’s all about networking, going to events, showing the benefits of your product in the ecosystem through partnering with influencers and others. According to Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, there are three rules that he would like to see for startups to do in order to try and succeed:

- Be specific in what problem you’re solving.
- Crowdsource your support.
- Be a part of the dialogue happening online.

Owyang says that with Twitter, it’s alright to have a non-engaging profile for your brand/company BUT you need to have at least one person listed on that profile so that customers can engage with someone from your company.The company Twitter page can simply be a news feed of press releases and other blog posts – and state that the Twitter page is not an active account.

For startups eager to engage in blogger outreach, Stage 2 consultant & blogger Jeremy Toeman suggests that you need to know who you are talking to. Actually reading what they write and building a trust with the blogger over time through comments, conversation and engagement is a necessity in order to have them even care about what product you’re creating. Toeman also suggests that if you’re reaching out to big blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch, etc that you should probably try and influence those people that the editors listen to – the concept of transitive trust.

It should be noted that the panel of Toeman, Owyang and Microsoft Bizspark “marketing guy” Jacob Mullins all believe that positioning is more important than exclusivity when dealing with bloggers. You need to tell the bloggers and even your stakeholders and customers “this is the problem and here’s how & why we solved it”. Frankly put, Toeman says that if you haven’t built a good user experience in the first 30 seconds of your customer or stakeholder trying out your product, you don’t have a good product. It’s your best selling point and you need to make sure that it has all the potential to succeed.

This session at the Facebook headquarters highlights an good philosophy that Jeremiah Owyang harped upon – be specific in what problem you’re solving. Without actually addressing this problem, your startup and product may not last very long.

You can watch the entire recording of this presentation by clicking here.

The reason I ask is I was with a friend the other night (at a restaurant, not a pool) and as she was gesticulating with her hands, the cell phone she’d been holding slipped out and went *plunk* right into her beverage.

With the casual ubiquity of mobile social technology, I’m thinking of the danger that any given body of water poses for the hundreds of dollars of electronics — cell phones, iPods, iPhones, digital cameras, BlackBerrys, etc — that we carry in our pockets or on our persons. (Especially at social functions.)

All this means that, what could once be written off as high-spirited wacky hijinks at the pool and some temporarily wet clothes, can now mean hundreds of bucks of hardware replacement costs, plus data loss and the existential angst of being cut off from your online life and the hive mind.

(Back in my day, when all we had to worry about was artfully-feathered hair and a digital watch, there was usually a 10-minute grace period after arrival at a pool party before you were subject to tossing. Nothing is foolproof, of course: There’s a story from last year involving a pool and a bunch of high-spirited Pro Bowlers — they remembered to save the cell phone, but forgot about the diabetic tossee’s portable glucose monitor. Whoops.)

Anyway, here are some other impacts of social media on the summer pool party:

* Obviously, the use of social invitations by hosts has made events planning and coordination both easier, and more complicated, because of the devaluation of the public RSVP, accompanied by the often-nuanced calculations done by attendees as they juggle competing social obligations, in light of public guest lists and socially-broadcast status.

On the plus side, I’ve noticed over the years that the food and drink that guests brings to parties (especially barbecues) has gotten better. It could be just an artifact of all of us becoming better cooks as we’ve gotten older, but I think there’s also a factor of not wanting to look like a skinflint at a party — social shaming via passive peer pressure from public lists of attendee contributions.

* Fewer people actually getting into the pool, due to the effects of gravity, previous good eating, and the formidable socially-broadcast swimsuit factor — specifically, the “not wanting to see/be seen by co-workers with jiggly and/or pointy bits showing”, which is pretty self-explanatory for most of us.

Of course, this problem applies to pool parties from the beginning of time, but at least the psychic damage back then was limited to those present. Now, with the ease of labeling, sharing, and publishing photos on Facebook, combined with most people’s inability to really “get” granular privacy controls, we may find pause, with an urgency that’s more pronounced than at your standard social function where you aren’t already half-naked.

At least, until the first couple of drinks kick in.

******

Have you seen the effects of social media on any given pool party? Do people still get thrown into pools in our gizmo-laden age? Please leave a comment below.

A similar thing can happen in a realm where the stakes aren’t so high, but the terrain is just as perilous. It’s a convoluted land of complex social norms, finely-calculated relationships, and polite fictions: the public social calendar.

This is social broadcasting in its most literal sense — you’re broadcasting what you’re up to, socially.

I’ve talked before about how publicly-viewable invitations have changed how people use RSVPs (especially how they’ve changed from actual indicators of intention, to signifiers of endorsement or aspiration.)

Now, when you throw public status updates, especially mobile status updates, into the mix, you add in a layer of self-accountability to your public responses.

At least, in potential — I don’t know that anyone is so aware of other peoples’ actions in real life. Or I hope not — it seems petty.

Here’s the scenario — previously, if you were invited to an event to which you didn’t want to attend (or you had a few competing events to choose from), you could beg off politely, give an excuse (washing my hair / food poisoning / just going to stay in and watch TV), and no one would know the difference (unless, of course, you ran into someone who later ratted you out).

Now, though, unless you’re really self-disclipined, you might find that posting an otherwise-innocuous status update causes you to out yourself in real-time (to say nothing about getting tagged in someone else’s photo later on) — by telling people where you are, you’re also telling the hosts you snubbed where you aren’t. And if you used a lame excuse or outright lie, you can bust yourself and cause some awkward moments down the line.

Call it truth and consequences.

We’ve seen this in work contexts (say, getting busted after skipping out of work to go to a Halloween party) as part of the broader theme of getting into trouble for posting stuff online.

Anyway, there are a couple of paths you can take to avoid this problem. The first is discretion (or alternately, obfuscation) and being really careful or ambiguous about what you socially broadcast. I don’t see this as viable in the long-term, since as we’ve seen, discretion tends to go out the window, especially after a few drinks.

The next course, of course, is transparency (it’s always transparency with us social media types, isn’t it?) — when you’re honest, you don’t need to worry about keeping your lies straight. Of course, you want to be diplomatic as well; there are many ways to say “I’m holding out for a better offer” while sparing feelings.

The last method is disinformation — deliberately broadcasting false information about where you are and what you’re doing. I’m not sure why anyone would want to do this, unless they were crafting an alibi, shamelessly social climbing, or had really touchy friends.

Obviously, this isn’t a new phenomena — it’s just that social media and social broadcasting make these potential faux pas so much more accessible to everyone.

Anyway, I’ll throw it out to you — as the host of an event, have you ever paid close attention to what the ingrates who declined your invitation did in lieu of accepting your hospitality? Or, as an attendee, have you ever got busted by a status update that got back to the host? Please leave a comment.

Here, I’m going to look at social media and expanding relationships between people who are already like-minded — even excessively so — and physically near each other.

But wait, shouldn’t that kind of relationship take care of itself? After all, it’s a regular, real-world, real-people relationship — the kind we had before all this fancy online stuff.

This is true to an extent, but a peculiar thing about a lot of these real-world relationships is that while they’re often pretty rich, they can also be narrow in scope. They’re situational relationships (I may be misusing or misappropriating an existing term) where you have meaningful interactions with people, but only in certain contexts: The person behind the deli counter; a regular cashier; a bus driver; the usual crowd at the dog park.

You might see these people every day, interact with them, know their habits and their shtick and deep detail about them — but only in the areas that are specific to that context. For example, the counter person might remember everything nuance about how you order your breakfast order and take your coffee, that thing you do when you laugh and what kind of sunglasses you prefer, but not even know your name.

Maybe this is more of a city thing, where people are a little more anonymous and draw stricter boundaries around themselves. Or it could be a personality thing, dealing with extroversion and tolerance for small talk.

But then again, situational relationships are why it can be so surprising to see people outside of their usual context, like the first time you saw one of your teachers in the supermarket, or one of your graduate student teaching assistants in a club (and were forced to consider that they might be actual, regular human beings).

Incidentally, this is what we’re trying to do when we talk about using social media to humanize a business — we’re trying to broaden consumers’ investment into the relationship, by exposing them to more than just the purely commercial context.

How the online stuff fits into this can be pretty sneaky. (Innocent, but sneaky.) For example, say as a customer, you become a fan of the Facebook page of a favorite bar or restaurant, primarily so you can find out about events and specials. From there, given the usual norms of friend / follower etiquette, you’re a click away from becoming linked online with the staff, which exposes you to their News feeds, which gives you more insight into their lives outside of the normal context.

(Not to say that you couldn’t have, you know, talked to them before. But this is a more gradual way to get to know people.)

I suppose what I’m talking about is humanizing humans: Providing us with information about each other, outside of our usual contexts.

Anyway, clearly, social media tools don’t eliminate these barriers. But they can reduce them. Though of course, given the proper privacy controls, you aren’t forced to engage with people in their new context, or add them to your social circle. Maybe you want to keep your separate world separate and you like being semi-anonymous at the dog park, where no one has to worry about who’s a high-powered CEO or what people’s politics are. But it’s an option.

What do you think — has social media expanded any situational relationships in your life? Please leave a comment below.

Well, it looks like this scenario may have finally happened, as written up by travel blog Travelin’ Light: Twitter user @izzyvideo posted a Tweet saying he and his family were on vacation. A few days later, he tweeted that his house had been burglarized. (There’s more info in his blog entry, and it’s been getting mainstream press attention.)

Since his Twitter updates were publicly findable on any Web search and also appear on his Facebook page, there’s no way (that I see, anyway) to pin this on one of his online friends or followers. If any of them had a hand in the crime in the first place: It’s perfectly possible (in fact, I would say probable) that the burglary was just a random property crime that doesn’t have anything to do with any social media at all. But it’s a fascinating, if disturbing topic, especially since it has a link to Twitter. After all, Twitter is about socially broadcasting your status in realtime, as well as the ability to search those updates, also in realtime.

Transparency as Vulnerability?
I was struck by a passage in Everfree, a science fiction novel by Nick Sagan, where a protagonist is talking about the wireless links that people use to communicate:

Watch lists tell us who’s in the news, so if I’ve got Claire on mine and she’s featured on someone’s channel, an alert lets me know. Watch lists are also a measure of popularity, so the more watched you are, the better. Slick way to get citizens to enjoy being watched. “How do I get more people to like me? How do I move up in the rankings?”…

…If someone’s using a link anywhere in the city, I can find out where he is and what he’s linking — another person, an information site, entertainment, you name it. Blows my mind how many citizens are willing to give up their privacy. Total transparency may be the selling point, but the goal is control.”

Sound like any social broadcasting phenomena we know? (Incidentally, the book came out in 2006, the same year as Twitter’s founding. Also, one of the bad guys is named “Ning,” though I think that’s just a coincidence.)

Opsec as a Way of Life

Now, intelligence and military types (including military bloggers) often talk about Opsec (Operations Security), which means being aware of what you say that might reveal what you’re doing. It’s best embodied by that most famous WWII slogan, “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” (You can see a whole bunch of related posters at the WWII Poster Collection at the Northwestern University Library.)

Another aspect of Opsec is the idea that a single piece of information might not be damaging by itself, but a watchful adversary could combine it with other pieces to form a revealing picture, as illustrated by another poster: “Bits of careless talk are pieced together by the enemy.”

Anyway, especially with services where we announce our physical location, I predict we’re going to have to be a lot more sensitive to personal Opsec concerns, because eventually, the criminals will catch up.

As a bonus, here’s a version of the Someone Talked! poster that I’d worked up for a more up-to-date warning message:

Modified public domain source image from the WWII Poster Collection at the Northwestern University Library

Have you thought about how people might misuse the information you broadcast? [Incidentally, in case anyone gets any ideas, my house is hardened and alarmed -- a veritable fortress -- and my neighbors and roommates are all former police / Special Forces / ninjas.] Is this overblown hype? Are you planning your own social-media enabled crime spree? Leave a comment below.

In the Twitter realm, following 275 people is nothing. Small potatoes. Chump change. Still, when I boot up in the morning, I find that I can’t bring myself to scroll back in my Twitter client (still Twhirl at the moment — I did test the Twitter integration in the Adium 1.4beta… that lasted about 10 seconds) to see what I missed.

Comparatively, I don’t seem to have a similar problem with Facebook, even though I have more friends there. Granted, I use it a lot differently (i.e. primarily as a birthday reminder service), and there’s more activity on Twitter (i.e. Twitterers blab a lot more — though I should crunch some numbers and see if this is real or just my perception).

But more than that, it’s easier for me to parse and categorize the different types of information on Facebook — invites, status updates, photos, messages, silly quizzes, etc. Partly, this is a function of looking at the Web page (vs. using a client interface), where different types of activity are explicitly compartmentalized in different sections — birthdays over here, events over here, etc.

Additionally, in Facebook, even in the big morass of status updates in the center well, different types of information look different. At first, I wasn’t a fan of thumbnails for embedded hyperlinks, though I find them useful now, if only to distinguish them as hyperlinks. Conversely, in Twitter, whether you’re talking about an event invite, hyperlink, photo link, or whatever, it’s all text (at least, in all the clients I’ve used so far), and therefore, you have to work harder to categorize each post… before you can even decide whether it’s worth paying attention to. (In McLuhan-esque terms, it’s a “cooler” medium, requiring more work. I seem to be on a McLuhan kick lately.)

Furthermore, public conversations on Facebook are threaded, or at least grouped. I’m not a fan of excessively threaded conversations (where every reply is spun off into its own branch), but basic grouping of participants really helps preserve context, especially when you’re dipping in and out of the conversation. If you’re going to stay immersed in the conversation (as in, say, a realtime IRC chat), a perfectly flat conversation is fine, since you can see the flow of posts, which provides cues as to who’s responding to whom, whereas if you’re viewing a chat transcript, you lose that aspect of data and have to rely solely on proximity of responses to statements (or study timestamps, which is tedious).

Anyway, all the extra “work” in parsing Twitter conversations is leading me to Post-Twitter Stress Disorder (no disrespect intended to those affected by actual PTSD). I’m not sure what to do about this — I’m not sure how much pruning my followers would help, and switching back to the Web interface doesn’t seem workable (still doesn’t address the homogeneous appearance of posts).

I’m open to suggestions — please leave a comment if you’ve got one.

My experience over the past few months using both platforms is this:

* Twitter is better for getting clicks on links

* Facebook is better for getting answers to questions

The most recent example came when I threw out a question to the hive mind, asking, “Which replacement iPod I should get?” I posted it to Twitter, and it also got picked up and posted to my Facebook status (I almost never update it directly.)

I didn’t get a single response from Twitter, but did get a bunch of useful feedback on Facebook.

Looking at the Audience
In quantitative terms, I have more Facebook friends — 515 — than Twitter followers — 328. (I’m also following 275 people.) I’m not sure, but I don’t think this is a typical mix: my Twitter numbers seem to be on the low-end for someone in the social media / online community / social marketing / social self-promotion space.

There’s a good degree of overlap between the two audiences, though there are still a lot of folks in my personal social network who still don’t use Twitter (or use it reluctantly).

Also, despite the fact that I have more Facebook friends, I’ve generally exercised more discipline there in friending, as opposed to Twitter, where I’m following more people whom I’ve never met, or whom I’ve only met once at a conference or something.

So, in terms of the second observation, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised — because of audience composition, on Facebook, more people whom I actually know will see a given post of mine, and because I have more solid relationships with them, I’m more likely to get a response.

As to the clickthrough stats: bit.ly (which I’m pretty much using exclusively these days for URL-shortening and click tracking) is a little inconclusive. Generally, I’m seeing a 3-to-1 ratio of referrers from apps vs. Web pages. So I’m assuming that more of the bucket of “Email Clients, IM, AIR Apps, and Direct” referrers are coming from Twitter apps than Facebook apps. But that’s just a guess.

What’s It Mean? I Dunno — What Do You Think?
Like I said at the beginning, this just applies to my own friending style and follower composition. (Also see this Webmonkey entry looking at friend / follower relationships at Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.) I’m curious to see what your own experiences are. To put it in question format, I guess it’s:

* How many Twitter followers and Facebook friends do you have?

* In your experience, which is better for generating clicks, and which is better for getting answers?

* What else do you expect when you publish a Twitter post or Facebook status update?

* How do you think your friending style (i.e. selective vs. open) has influenced the type of responses you get when you post to either platform?

If you like, leave a comment below with your response.