Back before we had Web 2.0 and cleantech to obsess about the Valley was abuzz about nanotech—the idea that sub-atomic particles would suddenly be the building blocks of, well, everything. It would make the paint on our houses last longer, the non-stick on our pans stick less, and our pants impervious to wrinkles. Somewhere, someone was probably promising their board they could use nanotechnology to make Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak a reality.

It seemed like a great investment thesis for a few reasons: There was actually real patentable science there and because the possibilities seemed so limitless, it was a huge market. A February 2005 BusinessWeek cover pegged it at nearly $300 billion by the end of the decade. (You know, now.)

There were some VCs who shied away, some—like Steve Jurvetson—who went whole hog, but most were somewhere in the middle. In other words, they didn’t really know if this tiny thing could be huge, but wanted some horses in the race just in case. In all more than $1 billion was invested in the space, according to that same BusinessWeek cover, and some 1,200 startups created. (The typical venture research firms don’t break out nanotech investments so better numbers are hard to find. I think BusinessWeek’s figures are actually pretty conservative considering fundings of $20 million-$40 million a pop weren’t unheard of.)

By some measures, the movement succeeded. According to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Project on Emerging Technologies more than 1,000 nanotech products are available to consumers now, up from only 212 products in 2006. The director of the study David Rejeski told PEHub he expects the number of products to reach 1,600 within the next two years.

Awesome. Oh, wait. Not awesome—What about the exits? Where’s all that nano-cash the Valley was supposed to be awash in by now? Pending IPOs of companies like Nanosys, Nanofilm and Konarka never happened. (All three companies are still in business and have raised hundreds of millions in venture capital and private equity between them.) What exits nanotech had were, well, tiny. There was never a huge, iconic nanotech IPO to justify all that hope and keep the believers believing and investing.

Looking at the Pew study, the product potential was clearly there. So what happened? One of three things: The markets for those products were too small and the companies couldn’t scale as hoped, the products and science was just too incremental to turn into a big hit, or some huge IPOs are still around the corner.

In some ways, that’s not too different than complaints lodged at the Web 2.0 generation. Skeptics say that most of the startups are less companies and merely Y Combinator-style features and apps that at best will get acquired for $20 million or so.

The difference with Web 2.0 is these sites and apps are incredibly cheap and quick to build and host. Designing sub-atomic particles that will be manufactured into pants are not. You know what else isn’t? Most of the big opportunities in cleantech.

Cleantech investments are down 30% this year in terms of deals and 60% in terms of dollars—with a big shift going away from energy generation towards energy savings. It’s in danger of looking a lot like nanotech several years from now. For the billions that have poured into cleantech—what do we have so far? There’ve been a few public exits. We’ve had a smaller number of jaw-droppingly killer products, mostly in the car space with companies like Tesla, Fisker and Better Place. And….what else exactly?

As oil prices have spent much of the last year in more reasonable territory and the whole Inconvenient-Truth-fad has faded, cleantech needs a huge Netscape-like IPO to get everyone excited and ignite real investment in needle-moving science and development, not play-it-safe software programs to manage smart grids more effectively. VC Paul Holland of Foundation Capital says in the Press:Here clip below that there are a few contenders on the horizon right now. [Discussion near the 4 minute mark.]

Others have speculated that several cleantech companies were readying themselves to go public before the crash, signaling a potentially active 2010. But most of these are well under the $1 billion market cap level. For an industry that billions have been invested in—that’s like kissing your sister.

No doubt the opportunity is huge for cleantech to remake nearly every old-line industry in the world. And I don’t doubt that it will. The question is whether it succeeds where nanotech failed and remakes the golden era of VC returns.

[BTW: Steve Jurvetson, if you're reading this and that big IPO is just around the corner, we'd love a guest post rebuttal on why nanotech is still alive.]

Just as our sister site MobileCrunch wrote about yesterday, Chinese telecom giant China Unicom has just officially announced that it has reached a deal with Apple to sell the iPhone in China. They did so as an aside in their earnings announcement, which you can find here.

Some details not revealed yesterday include that this is a 3-year deal between China Unicom and Apple, and that the first iPhones will ship sometime in Q4 of this year (the report yesterday had said October, which is certainly a possibility). Not stated is whether this will be the iPhone 3GS or the older iPhone 3G [Update below]. Recent reports had indicated that either way, the device would not come with WiFi functionality (which had supposedly long been one sticking point between Apple and the Chinese carriers).

China Unicom is the second largest mobile provider in China, behind China Mobile. But even as the number two in China, that still makes it the third largest mobile provider in the world. Or think about it this way: While the U.S. has something like 270 million cellular subscribers total across all the carriers, China Unicom has over 140 million alone. For comparison’s sake, AT&T; has just about half of that, around 78 million.

If Apple can capture a significant percentage of the China Unicom subscribers, and possibly pull in some from other carriers (China has around 700 million total cellular subscribers), that will be huge. While the iPhone is now in over 80 countries, sales are still dominated by the U.S. which accounts for just about half of the units. Success in China could obviously change that, big time.

Update: One of our commenters, Snake Chen, appears to be reporting live from the press conference in China. According to him, China Unicom will get both the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 3G, just like we have in the U.S. Here’s his coverage in Chinese, and some pictures.

A company called Sweb Apps has just launched a new service which lets anyone build iPhone apps, even if you don’t have a technical background. The service is aimed primarily at small to medium-sized businesses who don’t have an in-house or on-call engineering team capable of developing mobile applications. Instead, using the Sweb Apps website, business owners can create their own iPhone application themselves in as little as five minutes, says the company.

On the newly launched site at swebapps.com, a big orange button reading “Start Building” is all you need to click to get started creating your own iPhone application. Then, only six steps later, you’ll have a completed iPhone application ready for App Store submission, a process which Sweb Apps will handle for you, too.

How to Build Your App

Since the service is designed for businesses, one of the first steps is to select your particular industry from the provided categories. At the moment, these include: Restaurant, Retail Store, Business, Non-Profit, Government, Education, Entertainment, and Customization, a category which lets you design your own personalized app if what you’re creating doesn’t fit into one of the other categories.

From within each of these sections, there are various buttons to choose from. For example, in the “Restaurant” category, you can add buttons like “menu,” “reservations,” “map,” etc. There are even buttons for Facebook and Twitter which allow you to direct customers to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Sample layouts are provided, too. After picking your buttons, you create your Sweb Apps account and submit the information about your business. The fifth step is to customize the application with your business’s personalized info. In the case of the restaurant app, for example, that would mean filling out the menu, listing your hours and address, and so on.

The final step is to submit payment. Prices vary depending on which package you choose. Packages with 4 buttons are $200, 6 buttons are $300, and 8 buttons are $400. In addition, Sweb Apps charges a $50 one-time setup fee and a $25/month hosting fee. For an extra $10/month, business owners can optionally choose to add on a simple analytics package called “App Tracker” which lets you track the number of downloads and button clicks. By tracking this sort of information, it’s easy to tell which buttons are accessed most and which are being ignored, allowing you to re-design the app to better engage your customers.

Customizations

While the process of app building is extremely simple, and yes, we were able to create a basic app in a matter of minutes (we stopped short of paying for it of course!), the end result is a somewhat basic-looking application. But there are a couple of things you can do to spruce it up a little. For one, you’re able to select your own background color, and this can even be a custom color of your choosing. Sweb Apps also lets you upload your own button images instead of using the defaults provided. This would definitely give your app a more unique and personalized look, so it’s worth looking into. If you’re not all that handy with Photoshop yourself, it would be a good idea to hire a designer or crowdsource the project through a site like 99Designs or CrowdSpring and have someone create custom buttons for you.

The Best Part: Real-Time Updates!

If anything ever changes and needs to be updated, you simply return to your Sweb Apps account and make the changes there. Instead of waiting on Apple to approve the update as is done with traditional iPhone applications, the updates to Sweb Apps go live in real-time thanks to the company’s hosted Content Management System. With Sweb Apps, all the app’s content is housed in the company’s own database which is why it’s able to be updated on-the-fly (and why there’s a monthly hosting fee). The possibilities here are endless. This feature allows a business to promote one-time events, specials, coupons, sales, or anything else that would be offered on a limited time basis. This, in fact, may be the best feature of the app builder. Real-time communication with your customer base through the mobile is exactly what applications should provide, but when relying on Apple and their mysterious approval process, the delays involved often prevent this from happening.

Sweb Apps could function as a way for businesses to distribute mobile coupons, too. With buttons like “Photo Gallery” which can be renamed to anything you like (such as “Coupons” or “Specials”), businesses could update their apps with pre-designed mobile coupons, if they so wished.

Lots of Potential, Future Plans

Not that long ago, we wondered why there weren’t more iPhone applications for businesses available in the App Store. It’s possible that was because the tools to make building mobile apps easy were simply not good enough. With Sweb Apps, though, this could quickly change. Being able to build a mobile application with no technical know-how using a dead-simple onscreen guide is the sort of mobile service we’re sure many businesses have been dreaming about. (At least we hope so! We would love to track the sales at a few of our favorite local stores via our iPhones.)

The company plans to introduce more features into their service in the future including premium buttons, Flash-based content (assuming Apple ever approves Flash on the iPhone), in-app advertising opportunities, and more. Next year, the company also plans to launch app builders for other mobile platforms including Android, Blackberry, and Palm Pre.

In Amsterdam today, the makers of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) browser Layar announced version 2.0 of the browser as well as a slew of new layars which have been produced since they opened up their API to developers.

A ‘layar’ is information overlaid on the camera view of your mobile phone, e.g. the asking price of an apartment for sale in the building your camera is pointed at. Layar will be pre-installed on the new Samsung Galaxy Android phone about to be released in the Netherlands and the Android version of the browser is available for download in the Android app store. The iPhone version will be available as soon as Apple updates its API to allow access to the iPhone camera.

The Layar event was opened by science fiction writer and Wired editor Bruce Sterling who has been blogging recently about the augmented reality scene, appropriately enough.

One of the least appreciated, but smartest, moves Yahoo has made in the past year is to launch Yahoo BOSS, its open search APIs which lets developers create their own custom search engine using Yahoo’s algorithms. We use it to power search across the TechCrunch network. And we are not alone. It has become immensely popular.

By last May, Yahoo BOSS was serving up 30 million search queries a day. You can see the rapid growth in search volume in the chart above, which comes from a Technology Review profile of Vik Singh, the 24-year-old engineer who was one of the main champions behind Yahoo BOSS. (He is one of Technology Review’s 2009 Innovators Under 35)

At 30 million queries a day, that comes out to about 900 million queries a month, which would make Yahoo BOSS the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. with about a 6 percent share. That is just below the 9 percent share (and 1.2 billion queries a month) comScore estimates for Bing.

But that is based on data from April. The chart is missing the last three months because Yahoo won’t update the numbers (I asked). Depending on the growth rate of Yahoo BOSS search queries since then, BOSS should now either be at par with Bing or even slightly larger. Between February, 2009 and April, 2009, search queries grew 50 percent (from 20 million a day to 30 million). Here are three different growth scenarios for the period May through July and the corresponding search volume numbers they would imply:

Growth Scenarios

1. 50 percent growth = 45 million queries a day = 1.35 billion queries a month
2. 40 percent growth = 42 million queries a day = 1.26 billion queries a month
3. 30 percent growth = 39 million queries a day = 1.17 billion queries a month

Remember, Bing was at an estimated 1.21 billion queries a month for the month of July. So BOSS might very well be as big as Bing. In fact, a couple months before the Bing-Yahoo deal, I kept hearing from people connected to Yahoo that BOSS on its own was bigger than Microsoft search. Now Microsoft owns BOSS as part of its deal to take over Yahoo’s search operations.

On the day the deal was announced, Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi told me that he wants to keep BOSS alive because “there is a lot of goodness there.” I’ll say. It adds about another six points to Bing’s overall search volume market share. (Click the market share table below to enlarge).

Y Combinator’s getting pretty fancy with their very detailed Request for Startups idea, which was somewhat like their “Startups We’d Like to Fund” post of yesteryear. Basically, rather than suffer through the dissatisfaction of loving the apps they’re with, the good folks at the aforementioned accelerator program decided to give developers a little insight on what their startup wishlist might look like.

Never ones to be outdone, we at ReadWriteWeb have labored intensely and discussed among ourselves to produce this app wishlist. We can’t offer funding, but it would make us picky little Internet geeks terribly happy if someone developed any of the six apps listed below. You know, while we’re waiting for the flying cars and food replicators.

1. Real-Time Mobile & Web Sports App
As it stands, jocks and geeks are still on opposite sides of the cafeteria. As with other verticals not typically in the geek milieu, sports have too long been ignored in terms of technology, support, and bleeding the sweet, sweet revenue from sports fans’ pockets. The sports channels and leagues each have their own bloated, useless apps, but somebody needs to create an agnostic web and mobile application to deliver real-time data, the parameters of which would be user-determined. All of this data is readily available online, ready to be queried by the right script kiddie. Sports fans need up-to-the-instant scores, game developments, news on teams and players, and stats relating to fantasy league play. If you can get the gambling angle, too, through resources such as the Sports Data Query Language, then you have a real money-maker on your hands. In fact, we’re not even sure why we’re telling you this rather than developing it ourselves. We must be gluttons for poverty.

2. Full-Length Movies on Mobiles
It’s a matter of time, we’re sure, before you look next to you on a subway and see a guy watching V for Vendetta on his iPhone. Movies are getting quicker to stream and more mobile, and mobile video display is a quickly-aligning Rubik’s cube. A combination of the right coding technology, the right player, and the right partnership with a giant such as Hulu or Netflix could allow some lucky startup to charge the pants off of mobile users per movie. Plus, it’d be a great trick to keep the kids quiet in restaurants or church or wherever, and who, parents and non-parents alike, can’t get behind an idea like that?

3. Multiplayer Augmented Reality Social Gaming
A few months ago, we found out what Crash Corp was up to, and that bee has been in our bonnet ever since. Augmented reality mobile gaming is definitely the frontier of its space. It’s a gamble getting gamers away from their hotly-defended consoles, their PCs laden with expensive video cards, and all the games and ways of game playing they know. That would be, shall we say, a game changer. Ha ha. But we feel the coolest, most hardcore application of AR gaming can be achieved through multiplayer, socially enhanced, RPG-type games as opposed to the kind of casual games that isolate rather than connect users and don’t tend to induce hours of Mountain-Dew fueled play. Something like foursquare is the embryonic, interface-free, back-end concept for what mobile gaming will become. We predict that in five years, all gamer geeks will have farmer’s tans. Also, the addition of semi-virtual currency in marketing promotions that are location- and proximity-based make AR mobile a brand’s most fantastic dream.

4. Real-Time Social Streams as Gesture-Responsive, Dimensional Displays
It’s 2009. We don’t have any flying cars. We don’t have a moon colony. We’ve waited this long, and we want SOMETHING, damn it. Give us our Minority Report-esque gesture-controlled holographic displays, or at least a BumpTop-like 3D app that can handle concepts such as relative size and weight of discussions, apps, and other users. With existing apps such as Seesmic Desktop and its ilk becoming real-time and constantly present, we see our entire social graph’s firehose glutting the data stream with absolutely too much information until it truly becomes the time-waster the mainstream claimed it was all along. We now need an app that can imaginatively and radically simplify statuses and microblogging and how we receive and parse them, and we’re talking TED-level imagination. Why anyone that brilliant would want to work on social media projects is anyone’s guess, but hey, it’s our wishlist.

5. Shopping App for Thrift Stores
We can’t believe some hipster hasn’t picked up on this already, but someone ought to develop a web and mobile app specifically for thrift stores, kind of like TheThriftShopper, but much more than a directory. We want to see locations, reviews, sales and specials, pics of good finds, and a social community for organizing ugly sweater parties! With the revolving door that is any second hand shop’s inventory, it’s probably not reasonable to ask for an Internet of Things-type cataloging program — yet. But it would be simple and fun enough to use certain APIs to create this kind of mashup.

6. Personal Inventory and Shopping App
We’ve seen several trade-and-barter apps lately, such as NeighborGoods and OurShelf, that allow users to catalog items they already own and request those they need. And there are a few good shopping applications, such as Alice, out there, both in terms of inventory control as well as social shopping. But coming back to the Internet of Things, what we want is more inclusive and integrated than anything we’ve seen yet. We would like someone to develop a way to manage multiple home shopping lists, including groceries, book/DVD wishlists, etc., that sync with retailer inventories and send mobile alerts. It would also require a mobile app that allows shopping to be completed and automatically updates web-based lists accordingly. Eventually, this is the kind of tech that could be used to create truly smart shopping carts, as well.

As incredible as it may seem, there are corners of the Internet upon which the RWW team has not stumbled. If you know of any good apps that fit these categories, be sure to let us know in the comments!

Also, if you’ve got a wishlist of your own, feel free to share below.

What were you doing in 1999? Maybe you were following the Kosovo War. Maybe you were starting to use Napster. Maybe you were entering your senior year of high school (I was). Or maybe you started blogging. After all, on August 23, 1999, Pyra Labs launched its Blogger product, which would go on to become the biggest blogging platform in the world.

Yes, on Sunday, Blogger turns 10 years old. And to celebrate, the Blogger team (which is now a part of Google following a 2003 acquisition) is promising a bunch of gifts to users in the form of new features. Without naming anything specifically, Blogger points to this list as a good reference point for some of what they’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks. Of note on that list are a better commenting system and WordPress-style pages (About page, etc).

It’s worth noting that Blogger’s roots are deeply tied to the new hot web platform of choice: Twitter. Pyra Labs was co-founded by Evan Williams, who is now the CEO (and co-founder) of Twitter. Also a part of Pyra Labs were Jason Goldman who now runs product development for Twitter, and Jason Shellen who now runs Thing Labs, the makers of Brizzly, a much buzzed-about new Twitter client.

Biz Stone, another Twitter co-founder, joined the Blogger team at Google before leaving with Williams in 2004 to start Obvious Corp. which would eventually birth and turn into Twitter. (An interesting side note is that Williams’ Pyra co-founder Meg Hourihan, eventually married Jason Kottke, who is best known as being one of the web’s most popular bloggers.)

These days, while the web is abuzz over Twitter, no one really talks much about Blogger despite millions of people using it everyday. The fact is that as a platform, it has fallen behind the more nimble blogging platforms like WordPress and Tumblr in recent years. Still, in terms of straight up simplicity in setting up a blog, it’s easy to see why Blogger is still popular among users (and, unfortunately, spammers).

For those of you addicted to social networking, Thursday morning is starting out pretty rough. The two biggest sites for updating your status – Twitter and Facebook – are both experiencing issues this morning. Twitter’s outage started around 9 AM EST today and while Facebook is up (somewhat), posting updates and wall comments is currently very flaky. And you can’t even go vent about how this makes you feel over on your LiveJournal blog because – guess what? – it’s down too.

Update: Twitter says they’re fighting off a DDOS attack right now but the site is back up.

According to the Twitter status blog, a posting around 10 AM EST simply reads: “Site is down. We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.” However, Twitter Search appears to be functional and is somehow pulling in recent tweets, so obviously Twitter has not completely “failwhaled” for everyone.

To make matters worse, Facebook is also experiencing issues this morning as many rebuffed Twitter users are now finding out when they go to post their status on the social networking site instead. The Facebook outage appears to be intermittent, though, and isn’t affecting everyone. If you notice anything at all, it may be only that posting status updates and comments display an error message. But simply clicking the post button again may be able to force them through (at least that was my experience.) The site also loads slowly at times and is displaying occasional “transport” errors.

Ironically, you can see several complaints on Twitter about this issue right now when doing a Twitter search for keyword Facebook.

As a last resort, some users may turn to their LiveJournal blogs and attempt to update their mood to “sad” to reflect their feelings about this odd cyberoutage. Unfortunately, they’ll be foiled there as well since LJ is down, too.

Some users are already spreading a rumor that this is some sort of social media attack by hackers, but it’s more likely that it’s just a bizarre coincidence. Maybe the universe just wants us to actually get some work done today.

Update: The Facebook issues may be affecting comments which are integrated with the Facebook Connect system. I just attempted to post a comment here on RWW and it seemed to be stuck when the Facebook Connect window appeared. However, clicking the “X” to close the window allowed the comment go through.

Lots of people will be arguing today that this was inevitable, but the news comes faster than expected. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is no longer going to sit on Apple’s Board of Directors, nearly 3 years after accepting a seat.

The resignation comes a few days after the FCC sent letters to Google, Apple and AT&T inquiring why Apple denied the Google Voice application from its iPhone App Store.

Here’s Apple’s statement on the matter:

Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006.

“Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.”

Update: Google has provided us with the following statement from Schmidt:

I have very much enjoyed my time on the Apple Board. It’s a fantastic company. But as Apple explained today we’ve agreed it makes sense for me to step down now.

Hardly surprising, and it’s good to see both come clean on the situation: you can argue all you like, but Google’s foray into the mobile and computer operating systems, the two products mentioned in the statement (not to mention Chrome in the browser space), must have been quite the thorn in Apple’s and Jobs’ side. And I’m quite certain that the whole Google Voice App / FCC debacle only made the process a bit speedier.

Many people have always found it strange that Schmidt was on Apple’s board, but back in August 2006 when he took the seat Google had virtually nothing even remotely competing with Apple’s core products and services. It’s only in the last 20 months or so that possible conflicts of interests really became an issue, and we can’t forgot that Schmidt was consequently asked to leave board meetings when critical things were shared about Cupertino’s plans for the iPhone and the App Store.

(Image via Technologizer)

Soren Gordhamer is the author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected (HarperOne, 2009). His homepage is: www.sorengordhamer.com. You can follow him on Twitter.

There is growing body of people who actively use more than one social network, and do so with quite different purposes. Though on the surface many social networks seem similar, to use them skillfully it helps to better understand the different roles they can play in one’s online activity. Here’s what I have discovered in my use of both Twitter and Facebook.

Connecting with Someone You Don’t Know

If I want to connect with someone I don’t know, either for business, social, or personal reasons, I first look the person up on Twitter. I can generally learn much more about them through scanning their tweets than I can in looking at what they choose to show on their Facebook page. Reading their tweets I get a better sense if I want to contact them, and if I do, what their personality and interests tend to be. I can either @reply them or I can usually find a contact email in the website they list on Twitter.

Of course, you can send people messages you do not know through Facebook, but such communication, to me, is more welcome via Twitter, as people still see Facebook (as much as they are trying to change) as oriented toward communicating with people one already knows.

Breaking News

Lets face it, there is nothing quite like Twitter for breaking news. Sure, people post news on Facebook, but there is no easy way to retweet posts or to discuss the subject with the entire community, as Twitter allows through use of the hashtag. Further, people on Facebook are often attending to various other tasks while on the site; for much of the Twitter crowd, discovering and sharing news is their primary focus.

New Learning and Discovery

Twitter could be seen as one massive introduction system, where users recommend other users both through retweeting and mentioning the person using the @username option. The popular #FollowFriday where users recommend other users is one example of this. Sure, you can recommend friends on Facebook, but not with same ease.

Due to such simplicity, on Twitter you do not just get to know what a person’s interests are, you also learn who influences that person, and can decide if these people are also of interest to you. As such, for new learning, I go to Twitter more than Facebook.

Local News/Events

More of my Facebook friends live closer to me geographically than those who follow me on Twitter. Though many people on Twitter list where they live in their profile, I have not taken the time to discover the locations of those who follow me (and I do not want to take the time to do so). I can only guess that they are interspersed throughout the country, and as such I do not want to bother them with local news. Facebook is also aided by the ability to start groups focused on a variety of subjects, including focused on local areas.

There are certainly ways to find local Twitter users, and Twitter wants to make this easier. CEO Evan Williams addressed this some time back by suggesting using usernames as directional tools. People could follow @sf (for San Francisco), for example, then begin a post with @sf when they wanted to send information to those interested in the city. However, the effort has not seemed to gain traction, and how to make it easy and simple to access local information is still in its early stages on Twitter.

Connecting with Someone You Know

If I am trying to connect with someone that I know, I am more apt to use Facebook, if I know the person uses both Facebook and Twitter. Facebook allows me to see if the person is on the network at a given time, and I can easily start a quick chat with them, or start a Skype or phone call if I know they are free.

I can always, of course, send a private message to a friend through Twitter, but I like the immediacy of Facebook. I also find that I can have more sustained conversations on Facebook with those that I know, as people on Twitter focus more on “what’s new” than on sustaining a conversation as far back as yesterday. Facebook, with less emphasis on the latest news and more options for holding discussions, seems more suitable for longer conversations.

Help on an Issue

If I am looking for feedback on an issue, particularly personal, I am more apt to post it on Facebook. Though I have more than twice the number of followers on Twitter than friends on Facebook, recently when I posted on both networks asking what good audio books people could recommend for my son and I to listen to on a long drive, I had more than three times the responses on Facebook. Most the friends I have on Facebook I have met in person, and many have met my son, so they are in a much better place to make suggestions. It is not the same with those on Twitter.

Conclusion

While on the surface many social networks look the same, there are significant differences, both in their structure and what they emphasize, but also in the attitude that users bring. The more we understand these, the more we can know which social networks to use for what purposes.

Clearly, there are many other reasons beyond what is listed here for using both Twitter and Facebook. If you use both Twitter and Facebook, let us know, how you find yourself using one versus the other.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Deal With Social Networking Overload
– >Top 5 Funniest Fake Facebook Pages
– 10 Impressive Implementations of Facebook Connect
– Twitter for Beginners: 5 Steps for Better Tweeting

Tags: facebook, social networking, twitter