It strikes me as a study of depth vs. breadth. FB (and RSS) offer depth, i.e. deeper, longer content, where Twitter offers breadth, i.e. more potential sources.

It strikes me as a study of depth vs. breadth. FB (and RSS) offer depth, i.e. deeper, longer content, where Twitter offers breadth, i.e. more potential sources. http://weblog.muledesign.com/2011/07/density_and_difference.php http://weblog.muledesign.com/2011/07/density_and_difference.... But I feel like these are not mutually exclusive, and also not optimal to be separated/siloed onto different services. Esp. considering the fact that, for me at least, Twitter is often, or even largely, just another feed. The in-message text serves as a subject line and there's a link to a post where the real content is. This bothers me because it's just a crappier version of rss. Seems to me that a service like Google+ can do everything twitter does, without the limitations, given the right UI and some sort of filter system. For example, imagine Google+, with everything collapsed except a subject line. For posts without subject lines, substitute the first n characters with an ellipsis. Add a little arrow for posts that have body texts. Now you have twitter, except you can open links in-line by hitting the arrow. Simple tweets are just subject lines. Now imagine a filter option so you can see simple tweets in one stream and linked tweets (i.e. longer posts) in another. The tweetstream is for real-time messaging and brief quips. The full post stream is for what I still use RSS for. That's just my top-of-the-head first take on the problem. Ideally, this would all be service-agnostic/interoperable. But maybe that would just be RSS. So maybe I'm just asking for a better UI for real-time RSS.