Facebook, Twitter and the Gillmor Gang

I realize I haven’t trumpeted my Gillmor Gang fanboyism in a while. This neglect comes most likely from the two facts that A I haven’t been listening that religiously and the frequency has dropped, and B because the shows just haven’t grabbed me as they did last year.
In a recent show Facebook opening it’s status API was discussed, which was a fun episode. Talk came always back to the Marc Canter statement that Twitter would be worth only have as much after Facebook’s API announcement which proved a nice thread. I found myself agreeing with Hugh MacLead about not being able to get much use out of Facebook. I made an effort of playing with the stream controls and found that first and foremost it is slow. When I look at it in the morning, I see the same news items I saw when I went to bed. As if nothing had happened. Granted, I don’t have as many “friends” as MacLeod or Calacanis, but with 256 people there should be some activity. Where as, on Twitter, I am just in the zone. Robert Scoble was actually the great catalyst of the conversation, reminding everybody that it still need the user/comunity to make or break a service, not the feature.
Missing from the debate was the mention that one was previously able to connect Facebook status with twitter, thereby automatically displaying any twitter message in the status, and, with the new API, that now applications such as Twhirl might be able to integrate “Facebook” as a destination to send updates to. Not a game changer, but still that is stuff many geeks live for.
Try as hard as I might, I am not getting sucked into Facebook. One could argue that Twitter is wasting a lot of my time, but at least I get return. Not so much with Facebook. And apparently, not so much with the Gillmor Gang neither. I guess I just miss Dan Farber and Mike Vizard on the show.
(cross-posted to sebastiankeil.de)