DISQUS

dfriedman · 7 months ago

Given that Freud's entire corpus has been discredited, and that id is only useful as a somewhat obscure Scrabble word, I don't buy it. It's too coincidental and superficial a connection. There are many people who have Facebook accounts but do little to establish an identity there. Are you really claiming that those people are without ego?

A more accurate distinction between the two is this: Twitter demands concision and Facebook allows, but does not require, flippancy, sarcasm and joie de vivre.

HiMY SYeD · 7 months ago

Okay,

I must have it backwards, because I'm using Twitter how you describe others use Facebook, and ignore my Facebook account as I think ego=e-gone.

:-/

RealTrader · 7 months ago

So, if Howard is a jerk on Twitter (looking at some of his comments), thus he is in real life?

Wan-Qi Kim, Investor · 7 months ago

Fascinating. Howard, your understanding of short vs longform, public vs private, and id vs ego is fascinating. For every yang, a yin.

beanieville · 7 months ago

Interesting theory but not necessarily true. Fake people can be fake at email, at facebook, on television, at twitter, and in live person as well. If people want to expose a certain side of themselves, whether real or fake, they can do that in ANY chosen medium.

howardlindzon · 7 months ago

love it. love the sandwich and crepe just as much.

fallond · 7 months ago

Which gives good reason for Stocktwits success given trading is about managing emotion as much as it is about managing capital.

chad · 7 months ago

good points. I'd like to add it would be easier to fake it on twitter then facebook. I think it would be easier to maintain a fake identity on twitter since the follower has little information to go on.

Anon. · 7 months ago

Amazing. Not too long ago I was checking/updating Facebook every single day (sometimes multiple times) while till now I have absolutely zero desire to pick up Twitter. I'm 26.

Rob · 7 months ago

Im 25 and much prefer my FB account over Twitter.

I find that in its current iteration w/ status updates being the driver for the site, Facebook allows me to see 'tweet'-like information from whom i choose to see, trusted friends and/or colleagues.

If you're on twitter without a group of friends or a specific community, you're alone. someone "might" read your tweet but almost no one ever comments on them. and if i feel that my comments are not being heard or valued, then what's the point?

i find old school message boards the best way to quickly exchange ideas and discover new products/services etc with knowledgeable/like minded people.

MightyMouth · 7 months ago

You nailed it - Twitter sparks a LISTEN TO ME DAMMIT urge, posting on Facebook the little voice in my head keeps whispering, "nothing on the internet ever really goes away." Easier to rationalize a 140 char eruption than it is to try to erase those "girls gone wild" photos tagged with your name...

I think beanieville makes a valid point about the ease of faking it on social media, tho - so who's id is it, anyway?

Adam Sussman · 7 months ago

According to the logic above, I would think that FB would be a better medium for market color than Twitter.

Mr. Lee · 7 months ago

I think you're failing to take into account one of the key features of Facebook behavior. OTHER PEOPLE build and define your identity from what they post to your wall and when they tag you in photos. This is what makes Facebook more reputable as well as ridiculously addicting.

Twitter is potentially useful for gauging crowd reaction in certain situations but it's mostly a humdrum of cacophony.

CathleenRitt · 7 months ago

I completely agree with the way you and Howard Lindzon differentiate between how Twitter and Facebook are used. Your id vs. ego comparison is apt. I think it's borne out by the difference between my friends that are new to social networking. Few are on Twitter and most think they're being wild and crazy by being on Facebook. I mostly use Facebook as my Personal Life ego page - so it still has id elements.

That must make LinkedIn the Superego.

The differences between Twitter and Facebook are one of the reasons so many of Facebook's design changes that make it more Twitter-like bother me. I have always seen and used the two as complements to each other. Now, they're not really competing, they're less complementary and there's a lot more rmuddling. Half the time that I comment on a Facebook entry I learn that it was a tweet and I missed the chance to get in the Twitter conversation. I guess that's where FriendFeed comes in.

The number of comments disagreeing with you initially surprised me, but it gives evidence to my theory about Twitter. I I believe Twitter is the ultimate free country. A tabula rasa. Twitter is what you want it to be for you. Therefore to the extent that individuals like you, Howard and me use Twitter for unfettered thoughts, then that is how WE use it. So for us, the id is a good comparison and your post is correct. We're just one kind of Twitter user. Twitter is our Rorschach Test.

spryka · 7 months ago

The greatest benefit of Facebook is that it has many groups on the site that you can join. So if you are interested in Chicago Cubs you can research Chicago Cubs in the groups section and you will be able to find friends on there that like the Cubs. This is just one example, I know that you can join groups of your favorite football team, television show, or whatever you want for the most part! If you can't find a group for your interest, you can simply create one!

James
http://EmailCharger.com

Choi · 7 months ago

This article is so cool.
It means we can make service which match the SUPER-EGO :)

Mushin · 7 months ago

This is an interesting insight that I would gladly follow where it not for the Freudian idea of the Id as "... a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations". As a Viennese at the turn of the 19th Century who had mostly rich women on his couch one might get such an idea but that doesn't cut it - the judgemental attitude is to big in those ideas.
The same goes for the ideas of the Ego as the carrier of reason etc., as the Controller (like the man on the horseback). These are very aged conceptions that are, nevertheless, of amazing influence in our society still.

I like the basic idea you're putting out here, very much, though in spite of my critique of the Freudian look on Id and Ego. Putting it in my terms I'd say, Twitter can be the authentic, spur of the moment, stream of consciousness expression where Facebook is the more deliberate public persona, as you say, much more carefully crafted (even though, as the twitter-streams surface on the FB homepage, this is maybe changing slowly).

Managing flows of spontaneous (mostly; unless you have not yet blocked these sales gruys and grils that really are not interested in contributing anything but in directing eye-balls) and mostly authentic-in-the-moment 140-character-bits of information in a participatory way is an art that may be slowly emerging and develop further. And how good you're at it depends very much on your personal developmental stage.

Anyway, what I take away from your great post is the understanding that Tweets give us a rather good perspective on people's true, that is manifest and lived, values whereas FB gives a show of the espoused values. Comparing the two (where people are active on both platforms) might give us an insight, then, into how much these two sides of people cohere.

So thanks for bringing this up (and the interesting discussion in the comment section as well)

Love @mushin

Y2 · 7 months ago

The incredibly powerful sharing impulse that Facebook and Twitter have tapped into warrants much psychological study and comparison to make sense of. Your id/ego parallel is interesting and I think it can be further illuminated by taking the two channel's audiences into further account. Since Facebook is predominantly a closed channel for our 'real life' friends exclusively, while Twitter is a predominantly open channel for anyone in our 'internet life' to connect has significant repercussions on what we share.

On Facebook, I think its not so much the investment we've made in our profiles that our ego is trying to perserve as the investment in the identity we project to our social network that is being preserved. That investment may be an entire lifetime's worth of effort, depending on the extent of our Facebook network.
Twitter on the other hand is kind of an identity started from scratch. The investment in an identity is limited to whatever internet-based identity we may bring to it, if any.

As these services mature and the lines between them grows less distinct, it will be interesting to see what this does to our very ideas about the id/ego constructs and whether a crossover of these aspects in the online realm will initiate significant crossover in our overall selves.

great post, thanks.

vahidm · 7 months ago

I have to disagree: My experience on facebook is that it's my network to keep in touch with my real-life friends. Twitter is for my "bottle-in-the-ocean" messages, never sure of who will read them (and i actually have a sneaky suspicion no one cares).

My friends in Facebook can reach me in any number of ways both on and off-line, and i care about each one of them. Twitter is for anybody to see and opinionate... and i have to admit i care way less about that.

Sandra Mohr · 6 months ago

Great Blog! Would you be interested in mentioning a movie about Stock Market Manipulation that is coming out on June 10, 2009?

Please check out the site and movie trailer at stockshockmovie.com

It has been a really fun project and will hopefully help thousands of people to protect their investments!

Movie is called: Stock Shock!

All the best, Sandra Mohr

Barry Lowenthal · 6 months ago

Brilliant piece of thinking. I've always said how interesting it is that people rarely post things on Facebook that may make them look 'bad' to their friends. You never see people say 'I'm sad because I'm home alone without a date on a Saturday night'. People use Facebook to enhance their personal digital 'brand'. Twitter posts, on the other hand, seem to lack that self-censorship. Although they too are often self-serving.

Again, really great observation. Thank you.

-Barry Lowenthal