On the matter of good prose, I suspect you’re fighting an uphill battle there. People being people, they will of course use these services in whatever way they please. I already have a number of friends making “ugly” updates – and I doubt they’ve even heard of TweetDeck. Frankly I couldn’t care less. I still understand what they’re doing/saying. Either way, I find there are far more important things to worry about than the mild misuse of status updates on social networking websites

So for me and my habits, this was clearly a good development. It has already increased my productivity by streamlining at least a little of the “fluff” in my life.

However, I disagree with your assessment of the TweetDeck upgrade — I think it’s great. I love having the ability to choose whether or not to update my status on FB as well as Twitter. It gives me control.

True, the status format may be Twitterish, rather than Facebookish (i.e. not talking about myself in the third person), but I’m OK with that. When I write a Twitter update that will also be a FB update, I can be creative in making it work with both formats. I.e. “Found an interesting blog post on the new TweetDeck beta…”

What I dont like about Twitter and Facebook integration is that my followers have chosen to follow my updates but my facebook friends not. Did they care about my contents on twitter? Maybe 5%.
It’s like some kind of intrusion.

@Iain: Thanks for visiting my blog Iain and I appreciate your insights. You’re absolutely right that these Facebook extras are voluntary, and I for one will not be using them. However, since the announcement of your beta I’ve been tracking the response within the Twitterstream, as well in the comments sections on Mashable and Techcrunch, and most people seem very pro the integration. I am sure you did your homework here and it would thus seem like you made the correct decision, but my concerns stand.

I wouldn’t have an issue if TweetDeck users unchecked the Twitter checkbox when sending status updates just to Facebook, but nobody is going to do that. Which means we’re going to see a mix of Facebook-esque statuses on Twitter and vice versa. As I said above to Mike, I’m a bit of a purist about all this. I realise there’s every chance I’m in the minority – and with some big Twitter-users supporting these new features in TweetDeck a lone opinion is going to get somewhat washed away – but it does give me some concern.

As said I’m a huge TD fan and it’s absolutely changed the way I and many other people use Twitter, totally for the better. Because these features are optional it doesn’t really affect me in any way, but that’s never been the concern. I’m just loathe to the idea of Twitter becoming more like Facebook, and TD is so popular that it can have a real impact on the Twitter stream itself, the way it is used and what is perceived as ‘normal’.

To be completely frank I don’t really care what happens to Facebook because I only drift in and out of there on occasion. But while there are many changes I’d like to see made to Twitter itself, I’m not sure aggregation with other social media is one of them.

Again, thanks for stopping by.