Facebook, on the other hand, is evil

If you went to to a social media training event a few years ago and mentioned "privacy", you would be laughed at. Young people, you would be told, simply don't understand the concept. They are perfectly happy to put their whole lives online.

Well, those young people have grown up a bit and started applying for jobs. I suspect they appreciate the virtues of privacy a little better now.

I have always associated Facebook with this careless attitude to privacy, which is one of the reasons I have never warmed to it or felt moved to do anything with the account I once set up there. That feeling is strengthened by the company's own attitude to privacy, which seems a little casual.

But I love Twitter. Just as a blog does, it allows you to present as much or of little of yourself to the world as you wish.

The British Psychological Society's Research Digest has news of a paper that compares the personalities of Facebook and Twitter users. It is quite technical stuff, and the Digest notes some limitations to the design of the study, but here are some of the more meaningful findings for lay readers:

People who used Facebook mostly for socialising tended to score more highly on sociability and neuroticism (consistent with past research suggesting that shy people use the site to forge social ties and combat loneliness). Social use of Twitter correlated with higher sociability and openness (but not neuroticism) and with lower scores on conscientiousness. This suggests that social Twitter users don't use it so much to combat loneliness, but more as a form of social procrastination ... 

The researchers interpreted these patterns as suggesting that Facebook users seek and share information as a way of avoiding more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. Twitter users, by contrast, use the site for its cognitive stimulation - as a way of uncovering useful information and material without socialising (this was particularly true for older participants).

And:

Finally, what about people's overall preference for Twitter or Facebook? Again, people who scored higher in "need for cognition" tended to prefer Twitter, whilst higher scorers in sociability, neuroticism and extraversion tended to prefer Facebook. Simplifying the results, one might say that Facebook is the more social of the two social networking sites, whereas Twitter is more about sharing and exchanging information.

That last point, at least, has resonance for me: I have never been afraid to use this blog for passing on interesting links. You don't always have to try to make the definitive statement on a subject yourself.