De-coupling Twitter from Facebook
About a year ago I thought it would be a good idea to link Twitter and Facebook so that anything I put on Twitter would automatically end up in my status update on Facebook. After a while, this got annoying and I realized this was a mistake. First, Twitter users are used to frequent posts whereas Facebook users (at least the ones I am friends with) are used to posts every now and then. Second, Facebook is really about friends, but Twitter is sometimes about reading what your friends are doing and other times keeping up to date on industry, business, news, whatever. I always found it hard to post something like “I like Rainier Beer” on the one hand and then “Having problems using the Ruby on Rails ActionMailer”. Whenever I did the latter, people on my FB friend list would be like “huh?”
A few days ago I went about trying to detach Twitter and FB. It turns out this isn’t that straight forward because I couldn’t remember how I linked them in the first place. When I researched how to link them, I was directed to the Twitter app on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/). So I figured great, simply press the “Deny” button and this should work great… NO! It didn’t work. Maybe I needed to logout first for the settings to take affect.. NO! I kept posting “Testing” messages on Twitter and they kept showing up in Facebook. Annoying!
I finally found this, and it worked:
1. Login to Facebook and go to Application Settings
2. Look for Twitter in the list. If it’s not there, use the “Show” drop-down box (upper right) to filter on “Authorized”.
3. Edit settings for Twitter
4. Under “Additional Settings”, uncheck “Publish recent activity to my wall”
That did the trick. Woot!
Since I will still want to post some things to Twitter, I am now using Selective Twitter (http://www.facebook.com/selectivetwitter) where you can append #fb to the end of any tweet and then Twitter will post this as your status in FB.
