Jake and I were chatting about this at Second Stop yesterday. Most tech folk would immediately answer "Twitter" to this question but Jake was pretty persuasive about Facebook's chances. Thoughts?

So over the past few years I've been pretty harsh on Facebook. Here's me at my snarkiest: bit.ly

I argued that your experience in social applications has as much to do with the network present as it does with that application's features and functionality.

I built my network as a way to meet people in College, but now, after years of growing my network, adding people with less and less in common (anyone who asked), birthdays are just about the only thing that all of my 600+ friends on Facebook share.

With some friendly encouragement, I decided to try a little experiment. Over the past few weeks, I've been pruning my network: hiding people from my newsfeed that I don't remember/care about, and adding some new friends — journalists and tech/media types.

Turns out it's really easy...

What I've found is that Facebook can be a better Twitter than Twitter. It's slower, and most critically, it rewards conversations in a way that Twitter's "dumb" ranking does not.

Twitter is a breaking news wire, Facebook is a news hub that encourages conversation. I think it comes down to the pace at which you want to move and the depth with which you want to converse.

I think both will, in different ways -- I've spent a lot of time creating and curating Twitter lists, so that's where I get the most news, but I'm probably not really a mainstream user. I can see a lot of people getting more out of Facebook, or from social reading apps or whatever.

Agree--depends on what kind of user we're talking about. Every time I run into a "weak tie" in person, he/she says to me, "I get all my news from your Facebook!" Facebook is so much bigger than Twitter that right now it has a distinct advantage in playing the more important role in news gathering, curating and sharing.

I'd go even further than Callie/Mathew and say that there are structural reasons why Facebook (and its associated ecosystem) will be a more important source of news for more people than Twitter.

The characteristics that make Twitter great — delivering an incredible volume of content, doing so in real-time, and offering ultra-light opportunities for content creation/curation, are just totally unimportant to the average news consumer. For that reason Twitter will find it difficult to evolve into a more mainstream product while keeping its current user base happy.

Facebook being more relevant to the mainstream user doesn't mean much, I think, in terms of either of these platforms affecting news in the long term. Today, Facebook may have network effects/scale on its side and therefore be affecting the experience of more individuals, more often, but if *the news itself* (as in, the practice of journalism and reporting) is changing more as a result of one platform or the other, I'd argue that platform is Twitter.

Essentially, I don't think the end user's experience as it exists today matters much here. Journalists (hell, many of us...) don't really like Facebook all that much (See having to "feed the beast"). But they do like Twitter. And what matters is how journalists/reporters are using these networks, how they're learning from them, an how they're integrating those lessons back into their work.

I disagree — what matters first and foremost is which platform offers a better experience to end users. If you change the way people find and consume journalism, you change journalism.

I think you are both right :-) Libby makes a good point about how Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) are changing the way journalists do their jobs, and that will definitely have an effect on journalism. But Jake, I think you are also right that the medium it appears in once it is "finished" -- i.e., Facebook -- can also change the way people consume it, and thereby change the motivations or processes that produce it.

A more interesting question might be what about these networks (and other primarily tech-focused products or companies - e.g., off the top of my head, Reddit?) has rubbed off or is going to rub off on news design in the long run?

@Jake, how'd you think about this when building News.me?

I'm not nearly as well-versed in this subject as the news heads in the room, but one thing that seems to have been glossed over is mobile, which (for the time being) twitter has implemented much better than facebook. Yes, the social graphs are different on these networks for most people, but equally as important is the fact that people appear to consume news from their pockets (twitter) just as much as the desk or home, and will do so with increasing frequency over time.

The conversation around news items seems to be richer on facebook for the time being, but that also seems to be changing with apps like news.me, etc. My view is that if facebook can't figure out mobile, they won't be the place for news. Thoughts?

I've spent the last seven years friending people from high school and college on Facebook. They don't share articles about massacres in Syria and the decline of traditional newspapers – it's the wrong medium, the wrong audience. So the tools, features, and design are irrelevant, in my opinion. Jake, my hunch is it took you a lot of time to tweak your News Feed appropriately and I'm skeptical that most people are going to want to make that investment.

@libby We're building for people, and people don't really change all that quickly. So when we look at successful social applications we try to understand what is old about the behaviors they enable. What underlying or even dormant human tendencies do they expose?

And then we look at the news products being disrupted today and we ask: what is artificial? What pieces are in place not because they appeal to some kind of real human need but because they appeal to some accidental historical incentive?

Do we organize news into categories like Business, Technology, and Sports because that's how humans think? Or do we do it so that we can sell ads against those "types" of people?

Do we write 1,000 word articles because that's how many words people can likely consume? Or because of production and distributions constraints that no longer exist?

What assumptions can we break down? What is old and un-changing about news discovery?

I just need to tell Josh Miller that my brother-in-law is named Josh Miller.

That is all.

Great points, Jake -- I wish more mainstream media outlets would take that approach to what they are doing

@Josh @Nick — see Facebook's acquisition of Instagram for two reasons:

1) They know mobile is important
2) They're starting to embrace purpose-built networks (keeping Instagram's follow graph separate from Facebook's)

If they can stay disciplined about #2, then the Facebook (and critically, its associated ecosystem) has a real opportunity to own this space.

Also, Callie wins the debate.

Other thoughts:

1) Facebook controls the faucet. Josh Constine at Tech Crunch wrote about this after the whole "Facebook social readers suck" uprising. Facebook will always be able to control its users' habits better than Twitter.

techcrunch.com

2) Facebook is McDonald's and Twitter is In-n-Out Burger. One is "available" and used by the masses, the other is for more niche audiences--newshounds, techies and Justin Bieber fans (who make up almost my entire following.) In that sense, Facebook will always trump the conversation.

3) My Facebook network's "weakest ties" influence me most on Facebook because they're providing me with a new and unseen perspective. Why? Because I can't cherry pick the topics they discuss like on Twitter where I follow politicos, tech people, media ppl, etc. More to say but characters limited...

Another thing to think about: the reverberation effect. If it's true that the avg user has 130 Fbk friends, what does that mean in terms of how news/content spreads?

I've yet to see anything on how many people the avg Twitter user follows, etc. but content definitely spreads faster (and more frequently because it says less about you/takes less work/isn't as big a deal?) on Twitter.

I think you put a lot more thought into what you share on Facebook to avoid a) spamming people b) giving the wrong "message" to your friends/connections. On Twitter if I think, "Hm...that was a dumb RT," I know the moment is over in a second.

I was at a wedding this weekend; it's where I do a lot of my anthropological research. Here's what I found: Twitter is the hush-hush, rapidly growing, I'm-on-it-but-don't-really-talk-about-it, source of news for a surprisingly large (and growing) number of people out there (I'll go ahead and call them normals to make this easy). What were people using it for: to follow celebrities, as a breaking news source, for fantasy sports, real estate news, and, cheekily, OMG Facts.

What I found most interesting is that most of these people don't tweet. So there is a risk of Twitter becoming a one-way mouthpiece for news orgs, celebs, events, or whatever, but eventually people will become contributors as well. Or they won't. If they don't, then how is that different from 10,000 years of news reporting anyway? Consumption changes and it's changing towards Twitter.

Facebook is what happened. Twitter is what's happening. If you're talking about real-time News, it's Twitter.

I disagree with the premise that Facebook offers more "depth." If anything, the comments on Facebook have become only slightly better than CNN comments. I like the idea that I can consume news from Twitter and it offers less noise than news consumed from Facebook.

Remember when Facebook Status Updates had the mandatory "is"? That was news. Your pictures from this weekend's BBQ is not news.

Jake -- do you have a few examples of people you are following now on Facebook that use Facebook particularly well for newsworthy purposes? I have to admit, my Facebook feed is all friends plus a few bands I particularly like. I can't imagine where from that list relevant/breaking news would come from that I'm not getting more quickly and accurately (and sans noise, usually) than I get from Twitter.

The irony is not lost on me that I found this story via Jake's Facebook page: buzzfeed.com