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How would you compare and contrast Twitter and Facebook? I’m tempted to say Twitter is instant messaging on steroids and Facebook is just like another email address I have to check daily and weed through spam. I’m tempted to say that, but I won’t.

No really, I’ve made some decent contacts and connected with friends on Facebook and that’s been beneficial. I also joined a few affiliate marketing type groups and now I’m inundated with spammy requests every day to install some silly application and join up with marketing thingy type deals from all over the world. Maybe their great, I don’t know, but honestly, I don’t have the time to check all of them out and rent space in my brain to whatever it is they’re doing. I also don’t have time to deal with a flood of requests everyday.

This is a problem with Facebook that isn’t even possible with Twitter and that’s one of the reasons I dig Twitter so much. I can follow who I want on Twitter and I get one screen to watch throughout the day to see if there’s anything interesting I’d like to go look at or respond to. It’s a genius system and because of the 140 character limit you have to say whatever it is you want to say concisely and to the point. I can also shoot a quick note to a friend without having to open my email and dig through a pile of spam or be potentially distracted with an offer from some Barrister in Nigeria I can’t refuse.

Okay, there is a little fly in the Twitter ointment here if you haven’t figured it out yet. What’s that you ask? They don’t have a monetization model and they aren’t makin’ any money. While we all love this little clean tool were supplied with for free, one of the reasons their interface is so clean is because there aren’t any ads cluttering it up. All those VC people will want to get their money out of Twitter some day and Steve O’hear over at ZDnet has a few ideas how that might happen.

Hopefully the monitization issue will be taken care of in a way that still keeps Twitter the cool thing that it is, because it pokes Facebook right in the eye.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

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I can’t think of anything in the last several years where I’ve completely changed my thinking about it in 24-48 hours. I’m talking about a 180 degree change from thinking this is the dumbest thing ever to, wow, this is great and everybody should be using it. I’m now a total Twitter believer.

Probably the biggest thing that convinced me as to how useful Twitter could be, was when people started tweeting my posts. First Wordvixen tweeted a post, then Jeremy Palmer tweeted my post about Twitter being hard to explain. Then I discovered I had nearly twice as many followers on Twitter as I had friends on Facebook, and it only took 2 days to do that. The light bulb is on at level three now.

And not only that, I like Twitter much better than I like Facebook because I can get a quick rundown of what everybody is doing or if they have an interesting article I might want to read on their blog. I don’t get assaulted with ads, or lame applications to install, or people contacting me that I have no idea who they are, or repeated friend requests that I’ve ignored over and over, or stuff that I’m just not interested in. I am a full time affiliate marketer and Facebook seems like a playground, whereas Twitter seems more serious and if I see tweets I’m not interested in, it’s simple, I just don’t read them.

Also, Twitter can actually save you time if you don’t abuse it. I’m trying to follow the major bloggers I read on a consistent basis by watching their tweets and most of them will tweet a new blog post, which keeps me from unnecessarily perusing their blogs and wasting time. Since you can have multiple accounts, Twitter can also be used to send out updates to a specific group of people such as with Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project where he is mentoring a group of 1,000 people on how to be profitable in affiliate marketing, which he is graciously doing for free.

No, Twitter definitely does not suck like I though it did.

Follow me on Twitter.

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