Stream of consciousness

Published at Social Disclosure, a PR & Social Media blog.

I promise not to let my Facebook habits ruin my Twitter experience.

That’s the vow I made when I first joined Twitter. It’s the decision I faced on the third step:

1. Create an account.

2. Decide if the account should be public or private.

3. The Facebook Factor.

So I created a private account, meaning I could feel more comfortable about sharing more personal details about my everyday life in real time.

But even with a “locked” account, friend requests pop up from three different kinds of people:

1. Real friends.

2. People who live in the area and may know you.

3. Odd people or businesses that you’ve never heard of before.

If you’re crazy, you’ll accept people from all three edges of the spectrum. On Facebook, I limited myself to the first two categories of “friends,” worried that I might offend someone who knew me if I couldn’t remember their name, or even worse, their face.

And now I’ve ended up with 2,000 Facebook friends. I might know 400 of them.

Quite honestly, that worries me.

So when I discovered Twitter, I set the law… I won’t add you, if I don’t know you.

And now I have a list of strangers, in both accounts, who want access to my account, and they just pile up as I magically hope to recognize them one day and invite them in.

If you’ve been following the social news as of late, you know doubt no (yes, it was intentional) that Facebook is preparing an all-intensive assault against tiny-but-swelling rival Twitter.

Soon it will be easier than ever to send out status updates that eerily resemble tweets. It will be commonplace for businesses and for users.

So Facebook strikes the spellbinding chord, and Twitter accounts suddenly dry up like springs run dry, but do I switch?

Certainly it’s a brilliant notion to integrate the Twitter service I love so much with the Facebook service I use so frequently, but something holds me back.

I started Twitter as a real-time diary, as a timeline of thoughts and actions, life. No wonder it makes sense to push that just a step further and shove it into a box holding my every photo and video.

But my dilemma is this:

When your Facebook profile serves as a PR representation of yourself, and your Twitter serves as a diary of personality, marrying the two results in some kind of conflict.

Do I want 1,600 strangers reading about where I am and what’s on my mind?

It’s definitely possible to cram all of my legit pals into a single friends list and grant them sole rights to my status updates, but here’s my issue:

There are times when you want your status to be that private diary and there are times that you want to announce (or advertise) a message to as broad an audience as possible.

For instance, “Harrison is watching CNN while eating tacos on the top of the National Press Building with Greg and Jezerey,” could easily be TMI for most “friends.” In reality, do strangers really care? And if they do, then I don’t want them caring.

But a post like “Harrison just blogged about the top ten most exciting things in D.C. Check it out by clicking here,” is something I’d want to send to as many people as possible. It comes back to the whole personal/PR representation.

While it’s possible to make your personal life your broadcasted or “PR” life, it’s a stunt reserved more so for celebrities, or people that strangers really do care about or feel as if they have a connection with.

Facebook could solve the problem by allowing two streams of status updates or sharing, but unless such a move was optional, it would further complicate Facebook.

The company realizes that people put on varying personas for different groups, such as business and family and classmates. Therefore, friend lists were developed.

In the upcoming redesign of the network’s homepage, the company places a particular emphasis on these friend lists in the news feed or “stream.”

It’s a new revelation that people either:

1. Add strangers that they just don’t want to see news from

2. Want to see news sorted by the areas of their social lives, rather than a jumbled mess, or

3. Keep looking for a Twitter-esque solution that focuses only on a single specific group, based on degree of interaction.

Another problem that emerges, both in Twitter and on Facebook, is social archiving.

Blogs take on a sort of non-linear state with drop-down menus or visual representations of calendars that can easily transport visitors back in time.

Twitter and Facebook are both competing to become the primary stakeholder in the very life of every human.

Our memories, our photos, our videos, our comments, our shared items, our discussions, our status updates, our location, all recorded in one single place.

Everything we hold valuable trusted as the responsibility of one company.

That’s why Google’s jealous. Google may have our search history and our YouTube videos, but it doesn’t have our life.

This is one reason that users get so upset when they’re booted from Facebook for one reason or another. This is why there’s such an audible scuffle over the terms of use at Facebook and the ownership of content.

In the world of tomorrow, when contact lenses record video, our mind has a direct link to sending tweets, and our discussions are recorded to reflect on, recall – the social timeline – is going to be more important than ever.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google realize this now. The race has begun. It’s a competition for the users. Why else would Facebook be so scared of Twitter?

Take a look at cell phone companies, for example. There’s barely anyone in the United States who doesn’t have a cellular phone. The market is saturated. That’s precisely why keeping customers is so important. People stay locked into a cell phone plan through contracts, and new gadgets and new services.

In fact, the only way to apparently convert users now is through a Trojan Horse like the iPhone.

About half of all customers who sign up for the iPhone with AT&T now have never had a contract with the company before.

It’s all about locking in as many users as possible and keeping them locked in for as long as possible.

To be successful in the development of the social timeline, Facebook and Twitter must integrate an easy way to search the past of individual users, by keyword and date.

Facebook almost paid $500 million to acquire Twitter last year. Instead, it’s decided to compete head-on.

But even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, sees a high value in communicating publicly through Twitter.

Just today it was revealed that the the company’s CEO has his own public Twitter feed, in addition to his private one.

Companies and PR professionals have always known that it’s important to be an integral part in the lives of customers and potential customers. Simply put, that’s the real value of social networks.

By finding a place on the timeline of the common man, a company ensures a personal part of at least one man’s history. And if the Web has taught us anything, one reference is a thousand references.

Social networking isn’t about talking to friends, it isn’t about sharing photos or tweets. Social networking is about life.

The companies understand that fact much more than the plebeians who in many cases blindly use such online software.

The gun went off a few years ago but the runners are neck and neck just a few feet from the starting line. Even Twitter, who got a late start, is catching up quickly.