For those who like playing with social media, let me know if the following scenario sounds familiar.

1. You join Facebook
2. You join Twitter
3. You connect up your Twitter updates to your Facebook status
4. People complain about it
5. You post your phone number to 15,000 twitter followers by mistake

Well, maybe not that last one, but that’s what the writer Graham Linehan (@glinner) did the other day. Oops. He has deleted it now, but I am sure many people will have seen it (including me) first. Which of course led to a certain amount of piss-taking (which I have to admit involved my good self) — which I’m sure he’s big enough to handle, but rather more unfortunately for the poor lad (and fellow blogger) he’s going to have to change his number and stuff.

However, most people manage to avoid that, but still have problems with twitter and facebook co-existing because, as Jared Smith points out, they serve slightly different purposes:

I’ve said that Facebook is a “slower” service, as it’s not intended to be something that one would run in the background as a real-time application (though the function is available). It’s something people check and then generally head away from. Services like Twitter or FriendFeed, though, are predicated on the idea of near-real-time interaction.Jared Smith

Also, if you are capable of sending 20+ tweets in a day (not that difficult, particularly if you get involved in a conversation), you’re going to be filling your Facebook wall with Twitter related gubbins that, for the most part, will be of no use whatsoever to your Facebook mates unless they use Twitter — when they would have seen the updates anyway.

And it appears more people are now carrying out this disconnect. I understand the reasons why — as rhett smith points out you can easily end up forgetting to check Facebook if twitter updates it; you’re sending all your friends messages they don’t want, and they are really two different communities so what is appropriate for one (and the way of telling it) may not be appropriate for the other.

But there’s a way of having the best of both worlds. To update your facebook status automatically from twitter when you want to, but no have every single tweet doing this.

Thanks to Selective Twitter Status, my Facebook status is updated from Twitter, but only when I include #fb@pigsonthewing

So that’s just the job. Thanks to Andy Young for coming up with his Selective Twitter Facebook Application. And, if you’re a Wordpress blogger who wants to update Twitter from Wordpress (and vice versa), you may wish to look at Alex King’s Twitter Tools which offer more than the way I use them (including stuff like creating “tweet digests” to publish in your blog if you want — I don’t).

So currently I have it set up so that when I write a blog post, I have the option for it to automatically update twitter or not. If it does update twitter, it will then automatically update Facebook for me. Kewl.Obviously if want to avoid hearing about my blog posts, this won’t suit you quite so much, but you probably wouldn’t have read to this point anyway…

While I’m on twitter related apps, I’ve heard of qwitter, which can apparently be used to send updates to you when people stop following you on twitter, and work out what the last thing you said was that sent them over the edge…

Not really one for me: I tend to work on the theory that while everyone is welcome to follow me, I have no intention of compromising me in order to better suit everyone else, so your options are, as ever, to take it or leave it…

There’s also friend or follow, which if you are paranoid about making sure that everyone who follows you gets followed back (or equally, if you’d like to take the huff with anyone you follow that doesn’t follow you back), this is the application to help tip your incipient paranoia over the edge.

This is the one which will enable you to get really upset because your favourite comedian or film star doesn’t seem to think that your own personal warblings are sufficiently interesting to listen to, despite the fact that if they followed everyone who followed them they would have 15-20,000 people to listen to (Graham Linehan, Matt Lucas, Mathew Horne) in some cases and frankly even more ridiculous numbers from 180-360,000 (Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry).

Obviously, at least in my case, they are wrong, as my own personal warblings are of sufficient quality for everyone to want to listen to them, but I can understand that they don’t know me well enough to know that yet So that’s okay.