02 November 2008 ~ Comments

A Plea to Fellow FriendFeeders

Tech

As many of you already know, I’m not a Twitter fan. There are many reasons why that is and none of them actually matter at this point because I have been trying to change my mind about it. You may have seen me around (@rahsheen). I decided that extending and remaining connected to my network of friends and associates online was far more important than any reason I had for avoiding Twitter.

Now, most of the people I have decided to follow on Twitter are people I was already subscribed to on FriendFeed, which is really my primary place of residence when it comes to online communities. Recently, FriendFeed added the ability to dump your stream directly into Twitter. This is the issue that me and you need to discuss.

Please, for the love of all that is geeky, stop dumping all of your FriendFeed stream into Twitter. Wait! Wait! Hear me out. Allow me to explain:

Twitter was not designed to be what it is today. It was to be something much simpler and people found more exciting ways to use it. We all know how that turned out. Now, FriendFeed has basically given each of it’s users a cannon to blast away at Twittter’s weak infrastructure and unsuspecting community. Most of those poor Tweeters have no clue what’s going on.

Back when I was active on IRC and dinosaurs roamed the earth, anyone who posted several messages in a row was considered to be flooding and would probably be booted from the channel, immediately. Now, if it’s impolite to flood an interactive live chat, why would it be ok to flood Twitter? You barely have the ability to scroll back.

We are burying everyone’s updates with truncated FriendFeed items.

Are you really adding value for your followers?

I just figured I would put this out there because I’ve seen a few people drop so many consecutive updates it looked like they were the only person I followed, and they weren’t even using Twitterfeed. Think about your strategy before you open the floodgates between services. Your audience will thank you for it.

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  • No one other than your close friends wants to see your Flickr stream, kthxbai! :P
  • Chacha and I had a conversation about this yesterday. I TOTALLY AGREE! This is NOT a good idea people. Please listen to and heed Rahsheen's words.
  • I never dump FF stream into Twitter - if anything, it's the other way around... Twitter dominates my FF stream.

    But the two are NOT the same environment and not intended for the same type of information exchange, so I'm 100% behind this post. :)
  • I couldn't agree with you more!!!!!! Twitter is starting to turn more into a lifestream & veering away from being a micro-blog. And I don't care for Twitter either.
  • The problem with Twitter is you can't necessarily kick them and have them know you kicked them from their group of friends like you can do in IRC. Blocking someone doesn't have the same affect as /kick - IRC still kicks Twitter's but IMO
  • True, Jesse. Which is why we should be even more careful of what we do.
    There are no social media ops that I'm aware of. We have to police
    ourselves. And, yes, IRC is still awesome :)
  • I need to come up with an idea that socializes IRC - I don't think
    Twitter is quite that. There could be an interesting model around that.

    One other thing I find interesting - Microsoft was at Bearhug camp
    earlier this year. What if Microsoft were to build a Microblogging
    service around MSN? ByeBye Twitter. :-)
  • Sounds like a neat idea. It seems simple to get people on IRC when it
    becomes the medium of communication around live video feeds.

    As far as the MSN thing, that could possibly work, but I doubt it would kill
    Twitter. I can't text MSN from my cell, I don't even have an MSN account. It
    would probably be trivial to create a timeline for MSN messages, but most
    people use IM for privacy, so I'm not sure how that would catch on.

    As a matter of fact, I have friend that refuse to talk to me on Twitter
    because they know anyone can see what they said.
  • I have to say I agree as well. I thought this was a bad idea.
  • I couldn't agree with you more. I initially only setup feed publishing to push my FriendFeed posts to Twitter, but soon realized even that would annoy most users since there isn't an option to allow linking directly to the link in the FF post and would force people to hit the FF url only to click again for the destination URL. I'm not going to annoy my readers by doing that so I quickly turned it off.

    I submitted 2 requests to FF feedback here and here that IMO would make this new functionality better.
  • Yeah, I definitely agree with this.

    I don't use Friendfeed often and I get annoyed when someone on Twitter is really just echoing back stuff. Sure, some people I follow don't really say "informative things" all the time, but that's okay. My thing is to communicate with them. It's harder to do that when you are merely echoing something that I could easily see on another service.
  • I'm not a fan of the FriendFeed blasts. There's no context for the links that are flying into Twitter and some have all of their "Likes" and comments sent to Twitter as well. I've seen 10 FriendFeed tweets back to back. I'm fine with the blip.fm links because most of the time they aren't all together. I'm also fine with Twitterfeed if you don't send any more than one of two tweets at a time.
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