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Twitter is a broadcast medium. Users blast tweets to the world at large. Sometimes these tweets are meaningful, sometimes not.  The user’s conceit is that they’re writing something worth reading.

Facebook is a sharing tool. Users proscribe who can view their information. Sometimes it’s shared broadly, sometimes with great specificity.  The user’s conceit is that their information is worth protecting.

The “Twitter vs. Facebook” fallacy is getting old.  Yes, both services are social web sites. And a Ford F-150 and a Corvette both have four wheels and an engine. The users’ goals are diametrically opposed from one another.

When someone publicly tweets, there is an implicit desire to reach as many people as possible. Twitter best serves its users by doing everything possible to distribute their data; the bus contains the value. As friction increases, savvy users will move to competing broadcast services.

Orders of magnitude more people share than broadcast. Facebook needs to ignore users clamoring for public profiles and continue to kill it distributing data in a secure fashion.

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Had breakfast with Joe Greenstein from Flixster and we talked about the future of web destinations. I agree with Fred Wilson– it’s the data, stupid.

That data gets far more interesting when attached to people. Why settle for the results of Yahoo Term Extractor, when we can attach highly structured data from sources like Flixster, iLike and Shelfari?

Once we turn people into highly structured lists of what they produce and consume, the sky’s the limit (privacy issues aside). I imagine that’s where the semantic web guys are headed. Maybe the lifestream folks will get there first.

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Update: Just reread this post and I want to clarify that I am in no way calling Joe an idiot.   Good job, Eric.  Way to make the friends

FriendFeed announced that they are opening the doors to everyone today. They lead the pack, with a more refined experience than Iminta, Plaxo Pulse, Spokeo, Profilactic, Second Brain, etc. But they still fundamentally suck.

The current standard for these feeds is reverse chronological order, with all the content lumped together, as if everything is equally important. Services need to investigate context-sensitive display mechanisms that enable users to zero in on content of interest .

Ultimately, this race will go to whoever most elegantly allows users to ignore 90% of the data at any given time.

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Whether I wear the mantle of “privileged Silicon Valley power-nerd”, I am less concerned about privacy than most.

However, something seems to be lost in the discussion surrounding Google’s new Social Graph API. While it’s true that an automated crawler is now connecting online social relationships, a user must explicitly link their online profiles for the crawler to cross the garden walls.

For Google to aggregate your Twitter and Flickr connections, you must publicly declare your Flickr profile on your Twitter profile. This may sound a tad harsh, but if you don’t want that information aggregated, don’t link the accounts.

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The news feed is at the core of Facebook app virality. I throw a sheep and all my friends learn that they too can throw sheep. Simple enough. There is an emerging group of services that aggregate one’s online presence into a global news feed – what you do at Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, etc.

Should SocNet-based apps should be included? It would obviously benefit the app providers, but what about the users? FB users have an expectation of privacy, so the answer is likely no. But what about sites like MySpace, with primarily public profiles? Should they be included?

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