The facebook stream is just completely winning against twitter. It's usable. You don't have to worry about 140 characters, you can post vids, pics that actually show up inline, and comments show up under each post.
For the "keep up with what friends are doing" use case, there's no comparison.
Either twitter will need to adapt - and fast, or I suspect they'll die.
Compared to Twitter, the quality of my Facebook feed is absolutely horrendous. I don't really want updates from all my Facebook contacts, and removing people from my feed is just not cutting it. I can be much more selective about my interests with my Twitter feed, so I actually enjoy most content I receive from it.
Admittedly, this is more about micro-blogging rather than keeping up with friends. Twitter can serve both purposes.
It seems like you are saying that Twitter is better because it starts with a clean slate. If Facebook added a button to start with a clean slate then the problem you cite would be solved.
I guess so. I don't know if I would take time to subscribe to all the people that interest me on Facebook though, since I already have, you know, Twitter.
One thing I like about the Facebook feed is that I can narrow it down to just Links/Videos, which improves the quality of the content somewhat. What I would really want to do is narrow it down to actual profile updates - status updates. Important stuff such as contact info changes gets lost in the stream of "having coffee," "traffic is bad today" style status updates.
The point they (we) are trying to make is that Twitter is a news feed from people you consider interesting. You don't need to know them personally, they don't need to care who you are. Some may be your friends, some may be celebrities.
Maybe all your friends on Facebook are really interesting. Most of us have some old classmate or relative who is a good person but constantly posts inane stuff to Facebook. My Facebook news feed is maybe 30% as interesting as Twitter's. I constantly unfollow boring people on Twitter and replace them by more interesting ones. You can't do that on Facebook.
For the "keep up with what friends are doing" use case, there's no comparison.
Either twitter will need to adapt - and fast, or I suspect they'll die.