Facebook vs. The Blog

I came across a post (Facebook, Twitter, and so forth) on Sailor Jim's blog (Sailor Jim; Storyteller 2.0) in which he discussed the fact that he recently joined Facebook but finds the hubbub of it all less appealing than blogging. He uses a pretty good metaphor for the two:

It seems to me that the Facebook / Twitter model is that of a large room, full of people saying things at random as it occurs to them, each with several other people standing there commenting on whatever random thing was said, whereas blogs are more like one person on a stage with a mic, standing in front of an audience. After they get done with their performance, someone out of the audience takes their place and does a turn, while various critics still in the audience write reviews of and suggestions for the performance they just watched.

I thought it was an interesting metaphor, and I wrote a few comments on his entry to try to extend his metaphor to explain why I see the two mediums as complements to one another, not competitors. Then I reckoned I'd copy them here, which just goes to show that self-plagiarism spans all technologies. Here's what I had to say:

Just think of the blog as the stage, and Facebook as just all the folks out there at the tables chit-chatting with each other and not paying too much attention to the stage, the bar, the wait staff or really anything other than their Farmville farms. There's no need for performance pressure on FB; it's just a place to chit-chat.

Then sometimes a good act comes on stage and people pay attention for a while.

I tend to use FB as a place to keep track of my family and friends, and I reckon the ante is that I pony up a status update when I check in. (Thus the hundred-plus "lunchin' in the cube" updates I've posted in the last year.) No pressure, just a quick sentence on whatever comes to mind.

That my seem like it's filling the Internet with trivia ... er, more trivia ... but really getting to know somebody over time involves knowing both the important stuff (got married, got a new job, had a kid, etc.) and the little things. And since my family members live all over the place, what I like most about FB is that I feel I have a much better sense of the little things in their lives. For example, I would have known that one of my brothers travelled to Norway for work recently, but I wouldn't have known that he was really thinking about buying a viking hat while he was there. That sort of stuff.

I tend to use my blog as a place to write out my longer, more coherent thoughts on things. And every now and then when there's something there that I think might be of general interest, I link to it from my FB account.