My colleague @berecruited (Ryan Spoon) and I made what has become our nearly weekly pilgrimage to Facebook on Tuesday to chat with some of our friends there. In the course of our meeting the Twitter question came up, and we divulged our bipolar personal usage patterns:  Ryan is a total Facebook bigot and never uses Twitter, while I am an avid Twitter user, though I have been spending increasingly more time on Facebook.

We spent a bunch of time discussing why this was so. For me the answer is simple: with the exception of a couple dozen folks who I follow because we are friends, for the most part I follow people on Twitter expressly because they have interesting updates and/or link to interesting content. As such, Twitter has entirely replaced my usage of Google Reader.

In contrast, the combination of getting onto Facebook a couple years ago and not really knowing how/why I would use it, together with the bilateral nature of Facebook friending, means that I have tended only to friend people I know pretty well, and for more social than professional reasons.  In contrast, many of the people whom I follow on Twitter I do not know, and so am not inclined to friend on Facebook.

I guess it turns out that my friends just aren’t that interesting…