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 ;) )

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