Many of those who use Facebook and/or Google+ are also active contributors to the Twitter chatter universe. Still it's not superfluous to ask what, if anything, distinguishes one from the other -- because they are indeed distinct.
My point of departure in thinking about Twitter on the one hand and Facebook (FB) and Google+ (GP) on the other is that they, while alike in many respects, diverge significantly when it comes to what can be termed their "core dispositions," their basic instincts.
They are alike, crucially, in that they are massive content-screening machines that utilize human intelligence rather than algorithms to produce highly relevant recommendations regarding the stuff available on the Web.
They are not like the Google search engine, which looks into the relationships among the pages published on the Web to suggest pertinent pages in the form or search results. And they are not like Amazon.com, which monitors the collective purchasing patterns of its users to offer purchasing recommendations ("Users who bought this item also bought that one.")
The so-called social networks instead just make it vastly easy to build, well, a network of individuals. That network, not the algorithms, provides the recommendations regarding what in the unwieldy Web is worthy of one's attention. Thus, to put it more succinctly, imagine a spectrum, where on one end there is pure algorithm content-screening machines (eg, Google search engine), and on the other pure human intelligence-fed content-screening machines (eg, Twitter; FB, GP). Amazon.com would be somewhere in between.
The success of FB and Twitter suggests that content-screening machines that stand on the shoulders of human beings, as it were, are gaining ground on their algorithmic counterparts. This likely has to do with more than the precision and relevance of the recommendations from each option (human vs algorithm). But let's steer clear from psychology, and just take this at its face value: human-intelligence networks seem to produce more precise content recommendations to their members.
Now if Twitter and FB/GP are networks of human intelligence, what sets one apart from the other? The complex configuration of how one builds a network on Facebook (and Google+) decreases the efficiency of what I take to be the core function of a social network (that is, to constantly utilize the intelligence of other humans to screen, filter, and recommend content from the Web). On Twitter, by contrast, the imposed brevity, the comparatively austere site layout, and the simple network-building (in the binary of follow-unfollow as opposed to the degrees/rankings of "friendships" on FB) all make the former a much more efficient information-curating machine.
And this is what I meant by core disposition. Twitter's core disposition appears to be a minimal-exposure interaction. Members of the social network post their thoughts, or better yet, thoughts of others (in the form of links to articles, videos, etc.), without all the auxiliary noise (relationship status, hobbies, etc.) one sees on Facebook. The focus goes mostly to what is actually contributed. And under the restricting 140-character limit, whatever is contributed has to be concise -- even links get to be clipped short.
Compared with Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are not minimal-exposure media. So to the signal-delivery that Twitter seems good at, Facebook, and to a lesser degree Google+, lets into the network a lot of noise. And this makes each a less-efficient machine/mechanism for screening, filtering and recommending content.
Granted, there are those who view the "social network" in a completely different light -- not in terms of efficiency and information-scouring, but as a tool to stay in touch with family or to combat existential boredom. These are valid purposes too, of course. My thoughts here, however, are aimed at a different dimension of how social networks are thought about and used.
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