...and yet I don't use Facebook much lately

This blog has been an unofficial Don't Say Facebook is Over zone. I'm not quite willing to let go of that stance, especially since statistics suggest that Facebook activity continues to increase worldwide.

But you guys, I really don't use Facebook that much anymore. And I'm not alone: Lots of my friends have drifted away too. Most of us prefer Twitter now, which means that one of the more interesting features of Facebook--the friend newsfeed--is clogged up by lame quiz results and remediated tweets that I've already read. All of the interesting stuff is going on over at twitter now, and Facebook is starting to feel like the social networking version of a print newspaper: I already got all the important news elsewhere, and the rest of what's there feels like filler.

More significantly, gaining a new Twitter follower feels like a bigger win to me than adding a Facebook friend does.

Now, I don't want to open myself up to accusations of Virginia Heffernanism. I'm not going to argue that my experience is symptomatic of any larger social networking trends. As far as I can tell, Facebook is far from an "online ghost town." In fact--and this seems important--as Facebook increasingly becomes the domain of an older and generally less social networking-savvy demographic, it's shifting to accommodate its new users' needs and interests. Though it has certainly tried, Facebook just can't keep up with the dynamic, socially complex Twitterspace; and the more it embraces this fact, the more it attempts to fortify the features it can uniquely offer, the more likely its continued success becomes.