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When I first read the  ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez’s story on a Twitter Exec claiming Twitter is NOT a social network, it kind of caught me off guard. I mean I always assumed Twitter was for social networking, mind you in a more public, information based, social networking of course. Twitter has always been to me, like Facebook or LinkedIn, all about how you use the service.

All those services offer options and abilities far beyond what would be required for a social network. In my mind social networks offer the ability for users to connect with friends or other users for some reason or another. Be that sharing news, talking about topics of interest or just simply seeing what is up in a circle of friends.

Chris Crum of WebProNews point out in his article  If Facebook and Twitter aren’t social networks, what is?:  “Google's  been a social network for years, connecting you to your network of contacts through services like Gmail, Google Talk, Google Reader, Google Buzz, etc.” He makes an excellent point, of course Google has yet to be able to put it all together in a packaged interface / service like Facebook or Twitter.

Like I said above, it’s all about how you use those services. Certainly you can achieve the same things with Google as Facebook. Keeping track of friends, organizing events, sharing photos and the list goes on and on. It’s a mark of their evolution, driven on how users on using the existing service that you can play games on Facebook, or that Twitter is publically acknowledging, to quote Kevin Thau: “Twitter is for news. Twitter is for content. Twitter is for information”.

That is driven on users on making use of that service. For me, Twitter is a way to connect with people that I may have never met. Share news with the world that I find interesting and spread my writing around. For a long time I didn’t like Twitter, I wasn’t finding value in it. And then I found the value in connecting with local accounts and people and making connections that way. In fact, I find that Twitter is my main source to find out what’s going on in my hometown.

So in that aspect, I think Twitter is a social network and that is the way it will always be for me I guess. Then again, that is the way I use it, and it may be completely different from how you’re using it. So tell me:  how do you use Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn?