- Image via CrunchBase
It wasn’t so long ago that we all had a “home page” when we opened our browsers. Maybe it was Netscape, or AOL, or My Yahoo, or iGoogle. Maybe, as in my case, it was all of those in sequence, changing every year to the latest and greatest. Your home page was the gateway to the big wide world of the internet, and it was a way of curating and controlling what you saw.
With the exception of Netscape, which has merged into AOL, all my old home pages are still live, except I don’t go to them anymore.
What is my home page now? Twitter. And that’s because I want the news from the web.
This thought process was started by a post by the brilliant Brian Solis, who thinks eventually our home pages will be Facebook.
Apparently, Facebook is rolling out a new feature to some people (Brian, VentureBeat, and the rest of the AList) that makes it easy for you to drag and drop Facebook to your home button. And then you will open your browser and see all your friends.
That’s fine with most people who live in Facebook. But I don’t. I live in a wider world. My Facebook friends are mostly people I already know, or family members. They aren’t always the exciting newsmakers I can follow on Twitter. Those newsmakers may not know I am alive, but through them I get the wider window. On Twitter I follow some Pakistani political activists, and some research physicians, health policy experts, and even Jay-Z. That’s my carefully curated Twitter world — curated sometimes to AVOID people whose lives I already know about in order to find out what I DON’T know.
On Facebook this afternoon, tailgate parties, football scores, weather reports from all over the country where people have gone to see family for the holiday, and yes…one friend (male) who got a haircut. “Go Green,” “tailgate food,” and “it’s snowing.” Not that there’s anything wrong with those comments. I’m as interested as everyone else in what my friends are doing.
But over on Twitter, links to:
“Why Warren Buffett is a PR Genius”
“China Addresses Rising Korean Tensions”
“Total Workforce in an Upstate New York Compost Facility: 60 million – worms”
and a 140-character analysis of what human beings care about besides winning.
I will follow some of those links to read further, and potentially learn something. Whereas on Facebook, what I see is what I get — with the exception of those friends who send their tweetstream over there.And I
I understand the power of unified messaging, and the greater power of rediscovering my lost high school boyfriends. I’m certainly not saying it’s either/or. But for now, Twitter will be MY home page.
