Having said that though, it does have a lot of potential for parties and campaigning organisations to keep in touch with people and organise existing supporters and activists—James Graham has been doing a fair bit with Unlock Democracy stuff, I first found out about Vote Match through Facebook, pretty sure that’s where a lot of the early usage stuff came from. Plus a bunch of the stuff I’ve got involved with with the Lib Dems was organised through Facebook, went to the House for a number of meetings organises througha Facebook group while I was in London, most of those people wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Combine the contacts list with the event organising and group potential, and you’ve got a powerful tool. That people aren’t too sure how to use it best as yet and some people are put off using it are issues, but I’ve said a number of times that I only give FB a few years before something better comes along, probably a distributed series of apps that interoperate around a central platform.

And I think we agree about Twitter and its uses.

I’m old school. I loves my Livejournal. It’s a blog and a social networking tool in one!

Yeah, facebook is too controlled, and Zuckerberg is too shifty.

(Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?)

So what’s this year’s big thing, then? Pownce? twitter certainly hasn’t slowed. It broke at SXSW last year, and is breaching the mainstream now.

Sunny,

facebook?

Political potential? V. limited. It’s sporadic. Too many “groups” no-one cares about. Too many silly apps, people are getting pissed off at being constantly spammed – beyond a contacts book (which it’s excellent at), I don’t use it. Also, if David Cameron tries to vampire bite me one more time, I swear I’ll…

MatGB

Yeah, of course twitter is a SN in the literal sense. But it works in such a different way, it’s hard to compare it to landing-page based SNs. It’s got as much more in common with traditional IMs – although of course feeds are hosted on a landing page, there is little in the way of personalisation, info, or the ability to create groups.

As I said, it’s about overlapping spheres of influence, which if you’ve never used twitter, you’d struggle to appreciate.

Some politicians are making the effort to make FB (and MySpace) useful—my old (Torbay) MP, found ME on MySpace, I still have the email saved as at the time it was quite surprising, now of course I have several MP “friends”, but that’s partially through getting involed through SNs. You get out of it what you put in, it’s noticeable that the Lib Dems, including Clegg, are very strong on FB, and Featherstone is playing with Twitter. Worth noting that I first got back involved in electoral politics because Adrian (Torbay and thus at the time my MP) found and commented on my blog.

The web can, and should be, a great tool for democracy. I give Facebook’s walled garden a few years before it’s replaced, but services like Twitter that can bolt on and interoperate anywhere have much bigger legs.

Aaron – I’m sure there are lots of people who take Twitter seriously, but I think FB has far more political potential. It just takes a lot of time and effort, which politicians don’t necessarily want to get involved in.

YouTube allows me to upload videos and post them where I like. But I know of people that use it as a videoblogging social network. Twitter allows me to post short snippets of text from anywhere I can get a mobile signal, so I most regularly use it when I’m travelling somewhere. But I also use it to liveblog stuff I’m watching on TV and direct text contacts. I then port my tweets to Facebook as status and daily digests to my blog. If I were a politician using it I’d have them display dynamically on my main website as well, no one need know I’m using Twitter if I don’t want them to.

It’s a web application with some bolted on SN features, a useful source of info and contacts, but it’s main uses aren’t the site itself, it’s the way you can use the application. Still playing around with it, but agree with Aaron, it’s a timesink, it’s brilliant, but the journalists have completely missed the point.

To call it simply a social network is, imo, wrong. It’s a liberating news mechanism. Like all the best inventions it has been evolved by the users – and has greatly expanded beyond its original – what are you doing? – remit.

There are serious, pioneering people spending their time twittering. People who never took FB or others seriously. Clever people who see their twitter audience as incredibly valuable.

twitter, in its evolved state, is about overlapping spheres of influence, ultra-tight microblogging (You Look Nice Today was founded on twitter), and *real-time* networking. I have written about taking twitter too seriously, but the more I see of it I’m convinced of two things. One: it’s a lethal time-sink. Two: It’s genuinely revolutionary.

From a political POV, if you use twitter as a one-way self promoting tool, you’ll have very limited appeal.