Wick.me

Yes, I know that Facebook and Twitter are two different beasts that have different uses for different people. That’s the case for me in fact. Strictly looking at Twitter from a personal standpoint, I use it for more information gathering and communicating with many people I don’t know in real life about things I love in real life, my hobbies and business. Over the course of 2009 I had grown very tired of Facebook. There was way too much noise and a lot of the status updates were people complaining about their day to day lives. Who wants to consume or contribute to that? However, just when I was about to kick Facebook to the curb, it has come roaring back to become one of my most frequently used social media sites.

My increase in Facebook use has to do with Facebook pages and Facebook’s filtering options. In 2007, when Facebook pages launched, very few organizations and personalities had Facebook pages. Thus, Twitter became my go-to resource for following companies and personalities (outside of blogs). But things have changed over the past 3 years. Thanks to 400 million users on Facebook, just about every business seems to have a Facebook page now. This has me opening Facebook more to follow local businesses, my favorite musicians, charitable organizations, and many many blogs. Some of these entities have twitter accounts too, but many don’t. Thus, Facebook is eating away from my time on Twitter.

I can’t keep up with social media in 2010 like I could in 2007. And a user’s time is the battleground for social media. The volume of updates and noise is almost unbearable. Facebook’s filters help with the signal to noise ratio. If you haven’t already, you should take the time to filter out those friends, pages, and apps that you are not interested in processing on your Facebook news feed. This will make your Facebook experience so much more valuable. One could argue that Twitter lists can achieve the same results as Facebook filters. But Facebook will always have something that Twitter won’t: 90% of my real life friends. It’s this combination of staying in touch with my family, closest friends, and following my favorite organizations and personalities that make Facebook a winner in this epic battle of social media.

Google Chrome became my primary web browser ever since the Mac version supported extensions. I just installed this Tumblr extension that mirrors the Tumblr for iPhone app.

Clicking on images within the dashboard view brings up a larger view as one would expect.

You can listen to audio files within the extension. Click on the Listen link and the player below appears.

Another nice feature is the Tumblr bookmarklet built in.

The only negative is the lack of video support within the dashboard view, but you can navigate to an author’s blog to view video posts.

Overall, the extension gives you an even quicker way to scan your Tumblr dashboard, but it’s not a replacement for your dashboard (nor I doubt it was meant to be). Try it out here.