To All The Twitter Haters on Facebook

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Relative to most of the people I know, I’m a bit of an early-adopter when it comes to tech.  Over the last couple years I have found myself discussing the difference between Twitter and Facebook to a lot of people, most of which are on Facebook and not Twitter.  These discussions have illicited a lot of reactions from me, ranging from feeling frustrated to feeling like I’m helping a person in need. 

My short time on Twitter has produced interesting results that I am very grateful for, and I’ve decided to share them after reading .  Here’s a funny comment I received on Facebook after posting a link to the article by Mark Suster about how Twitter networks are different than social networks, the inspiration for this post:

“Unless this guy is the king of irony, all I’m seein’ in this article is a pathetic fanboy unintentionally reinforcing the idea that Twitter is just for followers, fools and basically anybody who can’t focus on any aspect of reality that would require more than 140 characters to describe….F-U-Twitter and all your wannabe weenies.”

My response:

“Lovin’ the fact that your criticism is via Facebook”

Clearly not everyone understand the power of Twitter, but maybe this post will help some understand it by reading what it’s done for me personally.

Steve Elliot

I stumbled across Steve and his blog during the early days of my @420list account, which also served as my introduction to the service and sparked my interest to learn the proper etiquette of the network.  Steve is the editor of a blog called @tokeofthetown, and he’s an incredibly funny (based on his writing) and kind person (based on our interaction).  After a few tweets back and forth, Steve agreed to cover my website for the benefit of his large community that he’s spent a lot of time and energy building.  The post has sent thousands of visitors to my website, but the validation I received for my twittering exceeded in value the traffic by leaps and bounds.

Tristan Kromer

Tristan and I had a couple interactions on and off Twitter.  Showing his stand-up nature and command of proper Twitter respect, Tristan messaged me after following him and let me know to reach out if I needed any startup help.  I thanked him, didn’t follow up immediately.  Serendipitously, I attended an event at Hacker Dojo and was surpised to see that Tristan was mentoring the attendees with their projects.  Rather than dismissing this as coincidence, I decided to reach out to Tristan to thank him for helping people like me who are new to the scene.  I offered to buy him lunch for his input and advice on my endeavors, and he not only obliged, but also served up some stellar constructive criticism for 420LIST.  I highly recommend following his blog for great reads about startups.

These are just two examples of how conversations on Twitter can go from online to offline, even with total strangers.  These examples are certainly not as mind-blowing as the Dave McClure story of my friend, Alex Moore, but they were important proof to me that Twitter works.

Haters‘ gon’ hate, but I still love Twitter.