Category: Technology Author : Steven Hodson Posted: October 31, 2008
Tags : friendfeed, social aggregators, social media, Twitter
Don’t get me wrong – I get what this social media idea is all about. It can be great stuff; much like the hippies painting flowers on their cheeks and putting flowers in gun barrels. The idea that we are living in an electronic world built around the concept of free thought and transparent sharing is idyllic. The premise that we can access all kinds of software via the browser (even if they are a boring as hell) for free is a Utopian dream even though we have to have all our data parsed to feed the advertising engine driving this utopia. The fact that communication around the world has become almost instantaneous and real time can boggle the mind but we now do it everyday. We have made it so that the web is becoming a giant global hen party with everyone nattering at the same time. The fire hose of information and inter-communication is ever turned on and getting bigger everyday.
In this aspect Twitter has forever changed the communication landscape of Web 2.0; if they can find a way to keep the lights on that is. It is in a way becoming the main gateway of our online communication. When used in conjunction with services like FriendFeed that can import your Twitter stream; and reply to that stream, management of your lifestreaming (and I still hate that term) is made a little easier. However yesterday FriendFeed turned on a feature that has the potential to turn everything within that lifestream into nothing more than total white noise.
The idea is that from FriendFeed you will now be able to post to Twitter everything that comes in through your FriendFeed pipe. Say what? Just take a look at my current settings for FriendFeed of stuff that would be re-piped into my Twitter stream
In other words depending on the items I select to punish you with I could literally drown my Twitter stream and the poor suffering people subscribed to it with stuff they didn’t sign up for. Sure, sure they can always unsubscribe from your feed but isn’t that defeating the whole purpose of why you have the Twitter stream in the first place. People are signing up to your Twitter stream because they want to either hear what you are thinking about, what you are finding interesting or to be able to talk with you. They didn’t sign up for your activity that is happening anywhere else other than Twitter – if they wanted that they’d join you on somewhere like FriendFeed or Strands.
Sorry but enabling this feature would be nothing short of committing Twitter suicide.
Oct 31, 2008
LOL!!!! You had me at the title
Oct 31, 2008
I refuse to use Twitter, and so I don't have any personal experience on this, but I haven't heard anyone mention it…
What about the REPIPING problem?
If you use FriendFeed to import Twitter… and then output again to Twitter…
a) that's going to be alot of crap flowing both ways
b) that's a potentially endless cycle
Now, unless FF made a contingency for this, this “feature” is pretty much dead in the water.
–Kyle
Oct 31, 2008
Josh Bancroft has suggested that the defaults be modified so that only “FriendFeed” is selected. This would help to decrease the chance that people will inadvertently flood their Twitter streams.
Oct 31, 2008
FF went on record to say they don't reimport the Tweets so you don't get this issue
Oct 31, 2008
I've turned off a number of the services going into Twitter. From time to time I post articles to FriendFeed via bookmarklet and then engage in comments back and forth with other readers. It occurred to me that my Twitter followers would have NO idea what I'm talking about. Likewise, my blog entries already post to Twitter via Twitterfeed so I turned those off too. Glad they give you an option to selectively decide which services to enable.
Oct 31, 2008
I totally agree with you on this Steven. I turned it on just for posting my FriendFeed posts to Twitter, but after a little while was annoyed that I didn't have the option of allowing the link used for the FF post be the link sent to Twitter. I don't want to force my Twitter readers to have to go to FF and execute a second click to get to content I'm sharing.
I would also like to have the ability to cross-post to Twitter when I manually post an item on FriendFeed again with the aforementioned ability for the Twitter post to link directly to the link provided on FriendFeed.
Dec 12, 2008
If I'm understanding you correctly, you want your followers to go directly to the original link, not to FriendFeed. You can do this by going to Account > Feed Publishing and check the box in front of: “Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation (does not apply to comments).” The link contained within your Tweet will go to the original shared content; NOT to FriendFeed.
Dec 13, 2008
Yes, they have since added that feature after I posted the issue in their feedback room. That's one of the great things about FriendFeed they really listen to their users.