Today I read an interesting guest post on Techcrunch in in which Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin argued why Twitter is undervalued compared to Facebook. Their arguments try to compare the position of both companies towards capitalizing on their respective grasp on your social graph. Now I do not want to talk about monetary valuation of the companies, I'll leave that to the experts but I want to talk about value the services provide.

On Friday I had an interesting session on Networking at Vlerick with Jan Vermeiren, an expert on Networking. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that in fact the power of your personal network is actually in the second degree. What this means is that the first degree – people you actually know directly – are not really the point of building a network. The point is actually to get to the second degree, the people they know. You will need people outside your network to achieve your goals more often than not and therefore the second degree is very important.

Now how does this go together with Twitter and Facebook? Your social graph on Facebook is by default private to you and so most people actually interact only within their network. From the beginning the rise of Facebook was powered by people wanting to reconnect with old friends while still maintaining their privacy and not interacting in public. On Twitter the situation is reverse. Everything is public by default and I can actually see what most people are discussing, I can search through the stream of information and access almost any of it. While some people choose to hide their tweets, in my experience the majority is public. This means that via Twitter I have potentially access to all degrees of my network and can therefore grow my network. Long term I think this will provide me with much more value, although those people I'll meet and befriend I'll probably add as friends on Facebook.

In the end we have seen Facebook trying to lure people towards opening up on Facebook and making more information public. From my personal perspective that goes against why I am using Facebook. That is the place where I am connected with my real friends and not the place where I want to leverage my network. Twitter on the other hand is like a personal publishing platform for the whole public. If I have interesting stuff to say there is a lot of people listening.