Double and Triple Posting

Ok, so I know I’ve mentioned this before but not, I think, in a separate post. I know I’ve bitched about it before with the “Suchandsuch Twittered” on Facebook but I “Plurked” about it today on Plurk and—to my great surprise since to me it’s obvious—I was asked to give some explanations.

For micro-blogging “statusing” like Identi.ca, Twitter, Plurk, or statuses on Facebook (which I don’t check anymore) I don’t use an aggregation site like Friendfeed (which doesn’t clear duplicates anyway) or Socialthing (ditto) and I don’t use standalone apps like Twhirl. I simply—shudder—go to the sites when I feel like it!! What a concept.

So I’ll go to Identi.ca, Twitter and Plurk in turn and read what everyone has to say, what they have to link. The interfaces are different and I don’t have an exact overlap of contacts on each so I find value in all three. Even when they do overlap, on Twitter I have mostly everyone (who post links and ask questions + misc), on Plurk a subset who are/were using it more as a friendly chat, since it’s more practical for such things and on Identi.ca it’s currently partly a local chat (since Evan is Montréal based and everyone jumped on board when he launched it) and also a place where I meet new people because in this case I’m the early adopter and people who normally have 6000 followers browse through who’s already there and a few add me.

Aaaanyway, as I’m going through those sites I’ve started seeing duplicates again. It used to happen a lot with “Tweets” (Twitter messages) being sent to Facebook but it slowed down and, anyway, I don’t check statuses on FB anymore. But now, using ping.fm, a growing number of people post statuses from there to all services at the same time. THE SAME MESSAGE.

Now, unless you have distinctly completely separate lists of contacts on each—in which case it would make some sense—you’re just saying the same thing over and over again. It’s damned annoying (and I’m not the only one who thinks so). Sure, I could unfollow these people in one or many services but to me the point is : if you can’t be bothered to make the effort of posting directly and separately to a service, why the hell are you there anyway? (And no, I’m not talking about huge broadcasters like Scoble who are using those platforms for entirely different purposes, I already unfollowed their asses long ago.)

If the [insert name here] platform has value, take the time to post to it. If it doesn’t have enough value for you to post unique content to it, drop it. It’s annoying to others who see the same thing over and over and, again with the value, you can’t be getting much back from that network if it’s not worth the time to post something unique. If it has value post value to it, if it doesn’t, leave. Seems simple enough.

(Don’t tell me I’m bitching again on my blog. I repeat, this was a request for details ;) )

6 Comments

Martine July 7, 2008

Word.
Word.

Heri July 7, 2008

it’s to try out new services like ping.fm

also because some people are only on twitter, some have already migrated to identi.ca but i have for both of them the same message.

it’s like writing CC: for email.

but good point though. we’d need a unique identifier for an activity stream and twitter/plurk/identi.ca should be able to pick it.

Boris Anthony July 31, 2008

Imagine this:
There’s a TV show you really like. In that TV show, there’s this one character that is a bit kinda annoying to you but you don’t mind too much because he’s part of the story and he’s really a good kid trying to get somewhere.

Then one day, the TV show becomes mostly about him. And it’s on 5 channels at the same time. And all he talks about is something that you really can’t give a lot of your attention to.

Now, imagine you use IM a lot. And you use a client like Adium or Trillium which allows you to connect to any and all IM networks and it all becomes totally transparent to you. When you are chatting with your friend, you have no idea (and you do not care) which network it is going over… BUT you are NOT getting the message in duplicate/triplicate/multiplicate…

Same thing with what is very misnomered “microblogging”.
(The great debate about twitter’s scalability ends when you understand that it was built as a CMS when really it’s a messaging platform. Or rather, something in between.)

Yes, somewhere between IM client, blog publisher and aggregator. The underlying network is irrelevant, and the platform should be as well. When you subscribe to my blog, do you care which CMS I am using? This is part of what laconi.ca tries to solve.

Boris Anthony August 1, 2008

Oh look!
http://buddyupdates.aim.com/
;)

Patrick August 1, 2008

Yeah, plenty of those things around.

Patrick August 1, 2008

@boris: I assume your comment is meant to say that at some point we won’t care whom is using which, everyone will post and read from where they want in a beautiful world of cross communicating services and we won’t see double and triple posts?

In the mean time, it’s still annoying.

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