For as long as I can remember, I’ve been using the Twitter application for Facebook to automatically publish my tweets as my status updates. As an early adopter of Twitter — way back in April 2007 — I initially thought it was a convenient way to save time while promoting my views in both communities.

I first began to reconsider this when Facebook made real-time updates the centerpiece of its March release, which put an even greater value on the status update — and served as a direct response to Twitter’s growing popularity.

Over the next several months, there was nothing more annoying than to see RT or @ or #hashtag in the Facebook news feed — yet I’m amazed at how many savvy people continue to do it. Months ago I began deleting my re-tweets (RT) from Facebook as soon as I published them. I also avoided using the @ in the tweets that would show up on Facebook and abandoned hashtags (#) altogether. In trying to keep my Facebook updates free of Twitter jargon, I ended up using Twitter less, particularly from my iPhone, where it wasn’t as easy to remove Facebook status updates.

This week I finally had enough. Facebook and Twitter are two different communities. The people who follow me on Twitter are much more political in nature and interested in my conservative views. My friends on Facebook date back to my youth and, more often than not, would rather hear about my family, hobbies, work, and only occasionally politics. There will still be overlap at times, of course, but there’s no reason to be duplicative.

Am I making a mistake by abandoning the lazy man’s Facebook update? Based on the early response, I don’t think so. Take my friend Ryan Miller, an online strategist at Romanelli Communications. He didn’t much care from my live-tweeting of an Obama news conference earlier this year. He told me, “Rob, how about we just leave politics out of our FB discussions and we’ll probably both be better off.” While I can’t promise to never write about politics on Facebook, I’ll probably reserve my harshest critiques for Twitter. And I certainly won’t bombard people with another live-tweeting experience. That’s a surefire way to lose friends on Facebook or outright annoy them.

Already in the few days since I’ve turned off the Twitter application, I’ve noticed much more active participation on Facebook, which tells me it’s working. “[I]t is amazing how so many people don’t get it. Twitter updates are NOT the same. Too much “insider jargon” with #hashtags, @, RT, etc…. not the same audience at all,” writes Shaun Dakin. Adds Johnny Rice, “Thank you. I follow you on both hoping to see richer content over here.”

When it comes to Twitter and Facebook, don’t try to kill two birds with one stone.