twitter vs facebook: are tweets getting quieter?

That's an interesting question on a couple of fronts:

* The differences between Twitter and Facebook create different types of communities. Twitter is diffuse. Facebook (despite its efforts otherwise) is still a walled garden. I imagine Twitter's variation on community is more of-the-moment while Facebook has a strong gravitational pull.

* Despite the community differences, I wonder if Twitter is better for driving traffic to a destination. That "of-the-moment" quality seems perfect for snapping attention in one direction or another.

Related to all this: Dan Zarrella has done some interesting analysis around Facebook, Twitter and various usage patterns.

It's an interesting observation - as macslocum says, they're two very different social interfaces. Stuff posted on Facebook is probably more likely to be noticed as the traffic is lighter (certainly on my friends updates, they tend not to bombard with multiple updates per day), whereas Twitter is a more stream of consciousness blink-and-you'll-miss it affair.

I think they both have their advantages and disadvantages - Twitter's 'trending topics' is a good way to gauge the mood of the twitterverse. Twitter users are probably more broadly connected to their twitter chums, as anyone can follow anyone, but that has the disadvantage of attracting the spammers, and you end up wondering exactly *why* you're following someone when their once-interesting tweets devolve into a list of what they've had to eat that day.

Whereas I find that Facebook's plethora of apps which clog up the timeline with who has done what on mafiawars/farmville/bejewelled probably counts for a sizeable percentage of traffic on the site.

I've not noticed twitter getting any quieter - I have noticed other community blogging sites (livejournal for one) falling off as people move to the more immediate and quicker twitter/facebook updates.