It’s Facebook, Stupid (Not Twitter, by a Margin of 5 to 1)

Twitter has certainly been on everyone’s minds lately. The company’s traffic has declined recently, but its news coverage hasn’t. TechCrunch has written about Twitter 45 times in the last 15 days alone — including MG Siegler’s magisterial 2,500-word think-piece on Twitter’s re-tweet function .

Over the same fortnight, TechCrunch has written about only one other company so often — exactly as often in fact — and that is Google, with hundreds of products and $180 billion in market capitalization, which has in the past 15 days settled its dispute with book publishers, announced a $750M acquisition with federal anti-trust implications, and launched a major new rival to the iPhone.

By comparison, TechCrunch has only written 34 times about Facebook, often as an afterthought, in a post about Twitter.

But don’t blame TechCrunch; its Twitter articles get more traffic than posts about almost any other subject. And besides, while the distribution of overall media coverage is different from TechCrunch’s distribution, it isn’t that different. It’s the nature of news organizations to cover new companies more than old companies, and thank goodness for Redfin and all the other new companies in the world that this is so. It’s also undeniable that Twitter’s popularity among the media is in part driven by Twitter’s usefulness to the media, especially now that every journalist feels compelled to build her own personal brand.

But even if Twitter’s importance among journalists is natural and even good, entrepreneurs may not want to accord it the same importance.

It’s natural for us to focus on the bright shiny company, too. We certainly have here at Redfin, discussing all sorts of features to encourage Redfin users to share data via our site using Twitter. But we also survey our users two or three times a year, and here’s what we found last week when we asked 450 consumers what social networks they use: that they prefer Facebook by a margin of nearly 5 to 1.

So straight away, Redfin’s Lisa Taylor started working on sprucing up our local Facebook pages in Seattle, the Bay Area, Sacramento, LA, Orange County, San Diego, Chicago, Boston, DC and New York. Please join up!

And meanwhile, we wondered: could our users’ preference for Facebook be because our demographic is different? Well actually if any group of consumers could skew toward Twitter, it would be Redfin’s user-base, big-time: according to the same survey, our users are mostly male, about a third high-tech, and young but not too young (none of the teenagers who prefer Facebook are likely to be looking for a house). It’s hard to imagine a business with a meaningful cross-section of consumers that would have a different result.

So journalists and bloggers should keep talking about Twitter. But entrepreneurs shouldn’t always listen, at least not yet.

A Sound as Continuous and Dense As Stars

Michael Arrington complains again today that people are overwhelmed with email. Michael cites a venture capitalist who encourages people awaiting his email reply to befriend him on Facebook, but then admits he is even less responsive there.

“Someone,” Michael says, “needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.”

But if Michael wanted fewer messages, he could just switch to a private address without telling me what it is. Every time we write an email rather than call, or add another distant “friend” to Facebook, we choose a network over true friendship, communication without commitment. And usually, we’re choosing what we want.

This is a process that starts early: the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik recently wrote about the imaginary friend his toddler talks to on her toy-cellphone, usually only to say that she’s too busy to talk to him.

And it began a long time ago. The critic Hugh Kenner speculated that the disembodied voices of modern poetry grew out of the invention of the telephone. What I grew up seeing as a way to reach out and touch someone, a previous generation saw as a paltry substitute.

And now that’s how I now see Facebook, as a paltry — but not quite dispensable — substitute. Facebook comforts us with the thought that we have lots of friends. And yet the prestige that this network offers is the opposite of security, that 8^th-grade sense we got from knowing exactly who our friends were.

The “social utility” of friends on Facebook is different than other forms of friendship. Most of my friends’ Facebook updates have the quality of overheard cell phone calls: mundane, impossible not to listen for, really only half of a conversation, but also comforting. Someone stuck in Singapore for a year once told me that what he missed most was the English chatter of overheard conversations.

This is why I’ve stopped checking Facebook throughout the day, but then suddenly find myself, alone in the wee hours of the night, glad to see everyone there. The feeling it gives me was best described in Augie March: “Wherever it was dark there was this sound, continental and hemispheric, again and again, like surf, and continuous and dense as stars.”

Saul Bellow was writing about falling asleep to the chirping of insects, but now that sound is the buzz of our friends. Maybe the one-line updates of Facebook have just reduced communication to what we really need to hear, over and over again: “Are you there?” “Yes, I am (everything’s fine).”

(photo credit: Moriza on Flickr)