Cross Posting Woes of Micro Blogging Messages
The concept of web services to interoperate and broaden the ecosystem is a beautiful thing. I agree to this concept but lately I’ve found myself being frustrated to a certain subset of this concept. Where does my frustration come from? It comes from cross-posts of micro blogging messages. To be more specific, seeing significant amount of Twitter updates on my Facebook news feed.
Living in Tokyo, I usually check social updates and RSS feeds on the train. It often begins from checking unread tweets then firing up whatever I feel like checking next (usually Facebook, Google Reader or Mixi). What disappoints me here is having to rip through tweets that I’ve already looked at on Facebook. Tokyo is a busy place so it’s important to gain information efficiently.
On Facebook I have various types of connections from childhood friends to acquaintances. Some of them are on Facebook and not on Twitter (and vice versa). I guess this is to do with user demographics but the important thing here is that I’m gradually finding it hard to pickup content from my friends outside of IT. I’m saying IT because it seems from observing my news feed that it’s mostly my friends in the IT industry that have setup cross posting.
There is probably some sort of content balancing gimick in the news feed code but this seems to not work well against my heavy Japanese twitter user friends. It’s a shame because my cross posting friends are completely innocent and aren’t trying to deliberately cause noise. Last thing I want to do is defriend people just because they are innocently causing noise.
Further Thoughts
This is what user specified content filters are for! If there’s a ‘block updates from xxx service’ option I would use it. Or perhaps I’m missing something and there is a way to filter out content from certain web services in the news feed.
If there is such an option, I would love to be enlightened!
