Now, I was also an early adopter of Facebook, and that has its uses, but to my mind what it’s missing is that nonlinear experience that Twitter encourages. I have 220 “Friends” on Facebook and they are 99% people I’ve actually met in real life. Family, classmates, former and current colleagues, etc. And I can share my pictures of my kids and I already know them, and they already know me, and where do you go with that? Even outside of family, I’ve known some of them for 35 years – and no offense – but as nice as they are and as much as they may have in common with me, they’re not that likely to surprise me or introduce me to new things or ideas. Often times, I may only have shared an experience with them – same school, same job, etc.

Whereas on Twitter I currently have almost 200 followers and am following around 300 people and only about 5% of them are people I’ve actually met and generally I’ve got no shared common experiences. However, the people I interact with there have introduced me to new things, new viewpoints, and other people that I share things in common with.Part of that is that while we may not have shared common experiences, I’ve found that there are experiences we have in common, e.g. Star Wars being a pivotal film, eating bacon being a transcendental experience, being confused by the latest episode of Lost, etc. and when we talk about them, it becomes a shared experience in a way.

I’m not saying one approach is better than another, but what I can say is that as my tweeting has increased, my time on Facebook has greatly diminshed. When I go back to Facebook now, it seems somehow dated and AOL-ish (not exactly surprising considering how my mother is on it *waves* Hi Mom!) . We used to call AOL “the Internet with training wheels” and to me at least, Facebook is “Social Networking with training wheels.” Even after hiding Farmville and Mafia Wars and what ever other app is clogging my feed at the moment, it doesn’t feel quite real.

Twitter, in comparison, feels more sincere in some way. Perhaps its the distillation of people’s thoughts in 140 characters, perhaps it’s a different style of user – whatever the case, there’s an immediacy and authenticity to what I read on Twitter that seems to be lacking from many other online interactions.

And I agree...

Virtuoso pianist Lang Lang gave concert goers something special by playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on an iPad.

This unprecedented encore happened — where else?-- in San Francisco. Lang Lang played the song, part of it one-handed, thanks to Smule’s Magic Piano iPad app.

The $0.99 app, from the makers of Ocarina and I Am T-Pain,  lets users easily play music by touching light beams that stream down from the top of the screen. Full disclosure: Smule sent Lang Lang an iPad pre-loaded with the app in the hopes he’d take it for a spin.

Wonder if Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who penned the interlude over 100 years ago, would forgive Lang Lang’s occasional flub as he struggles to get it right on the unfamiliar device.

This may make me rethink my opinion of Lang Lang as a pianist.