If Twitter was like Facebook

People give Twitter plenty of guff, but at least its promoted tweets program is straight-up advertising--unlike the awful "pay to reach your own followers" stunt that Facebook is pulling.

⟿ Follow Rob Beschizza on Twitter.

MORE: facebook • twitter

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

awjt

I saw that and immediately my stomach curdled… there has GOT to be a better way to make money than blackmail.
- Just_Ok
  
  Extortion.
  - awjt
    
    Correct, and Facebook Men in Blue beating the crap out of you for your lunch money.
Nick Mailer

If twitter WERE like Facebook. Subjunctive.
KBert

Glad to be spared… pride is ok; more or less.
Rindan

Would something please hurry up and kill Facebook? I feel like we are living in the bad old days right before AOL imploded and everything had AOL smeared across it.
- kiwidebz
  
  I suspect the golden goose has already been killed and now it’s just a matter of time.
  - edgore
    
    Um…those weren’t golden eggs coming out of Facebook’s behind.
    - kiwidebz
      
      Not for everyone else, no, but for Facebook, they were definitely golden eggs.
- xzzy
  
  Google a little bit and add the facebook subnets to your firewall or packet filter of choice. You may not be able to kill it for everyone else, but you can certainly remove it from your life.
http://www.geekman.ca GeekMan

Ginger Power, brother.
Cocomaan

facebook is a scam? shocking.
Yaanu

I’m not sure if this works, but I’ve been told that there’s a workaround: If you hover over the Like/Liked button on a Page and add the page to an Interest List, you’ll be able to get the new updates to a Page while bypassing the whole paywall scheme; if you didn’t see it on your feed, you’ll see it in your List.
- mccrum
  
  Kind of a pain to beg everyone to do that for your page though. Especially since it’ll go to approximately 10% of the people….
novium

So I’ve heard a lot about this as how it applies to pages; does anyone know exactly how it’s applying to personal accounts? (I’ve noticed that the “promote this” or “sponsor this” or whatever the hell it’s called popped up there as well.
- fireshadow
  
  Go to a particular friend’s page, hover over the button with “√ Friends”, and click “settings” in the pop-up menu. From there you can change the frequency and types of updates that you will see in your news feed.
  - novium
    
    I don’t actually check in with facebook all that often anymore, so I’m more curious about how the whole thing is being applied across the board than about how to tweak my own account settings, but it is good to know.
    - fireshadow
      
      I believe the default is “most updates”. Also, I have not seen a way to change the default for all friends … it has to be done one at a time.
      
      As for the “promoted posts”, I think they pop up in different ways. One is that an individual can pay to have a post promoted (and labeled sponsored) which will pin that post to the top of the news feeds of all friends. I do not have any friends who have done this, so I am not sure how long such a thing lasts.
      
      It also appears that a brand can promote a post when a friend likes their page. For example, right now I see that a friend has liked Lysol, and this has been labeled as a sponsored post. I am assuming that Lysol paid for this rather than my friend.
      
      Right now Facebook’s position is that posting for individual’s has not actually changed and that promoting a post just makes it more likely that your friends will see it (but is not necessary). However, until individuals start using promoted posts more often, it would probably be hard to prove that the “most updates” setting prefers posts that have been promoted.
eldueno

My English teacher would turn over in her grave had she seen this headline.
- GregS
  
  I hereby propose a campaign to revive the use of the subjunctive in English to put an end to barbarisms like this headline.
- http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza
  
  She’s fine, they hand out leaflets in heaven explaining the difference between subjunctive and indicative moods.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  If she still be alive.
http://twitter.com/leonevilo leon evilo

i’m not sure about you guys, but if you have a few hundred friends and follow some brands/bands/whatever, there is no way you will ever see everything all of them post. especially if you have a live that prevents you from checking your feeds every five minutes. thus, thus, facebook algorythm shows you posts from friends you interact with regularly with a higher priority. if you do not interact much with one of your friends, this person is not going to see many of your updates. it’s pretyy simple really.
- redstarr
  
  Or they could just let you be the judge of what and whom you want to see more or less of. It’s not that hard to just give me everything from everyone I’ve ever clicked “like” on as the default and then let me adjust it down from there. I don’t like them having control over it by default instead of me. Sure, I don’t have time to necessarily read every single post by every page on my list. But I should be the editor, not an algorithm. If I opted into communication with a page, it should be up to me to hush them or to push them to the top of my feed.
  - redstarr
    
    At the very least, they could make the algorithm adjusted feed an optional thing sort of like the way that they offer you the chance to sort by “top posts” or chronologically. That way you can get the “hit the highlights” version if you’re in a rush or the full version if you’ve got time and interest.
http://akemi-mokoto.me/ Akemi Mokoto

If Twitter pulled that shit, I’d split. I’ve been with Twitter for +3 years, and that would bring it to an end.