web 2.0 rant

[rant]

So I love this idea of ambient intimacy. I love that I can get to know the folks in my community better and better through things like twitter, and facebook status updates and even their blogs.

I love that I can learn so much about people in short 140-character thoughts and quotes and comments throughout the day.

But I’m also getting annoyed that twitter is starting to become a “link dump” and/or a “read my new blog post!” @tonyjones twittered about this last week and I originally thought, well that’s a bit unkind – then I realized how many text messages (aka noise) I get throughout the day that are nothing more than “read my new blog post!”

I hate it because while I don’t mind seeing these things in facebook’s news feed or on my twitter friend feed I also see them in my RSS reader. So having an announcement about them show up on my cellphone as text messages really bugs me.

I know, I know – everyone just wants to plug their stuff — and honestly I’ve plugged a blog post here or there too. But I guess what gets me about the whole scenario is that for those folks I chose to go the extra mile in getting to know and actually opt-in to get their tweets sent to my cellphone (rather than just following them via the web). I don’t need a reminder to check your blog. And the fact that you automatically send me announcements every time you update your blog (rather than just highlighting the really good stuff) — or send a mass of tweets 3 or 4 times a day that share all your blog posts from the last several hours — makes me that less interested in following you or subscribing to your twitter feed. All the automatic posts just add to the noise and turn me off.

Am I making any sense? Maybe not — but I guess that’s why it’s a rant.

In full disclosure, the encounter blog and website are setup to automatically post a tweet anytime and every time a new blog post is updated and/or we post a new announcement or podcast to the website. So you can probably rant and rave about that and argue that I’m being biased (maybe this is where my rant/argument falls apart). However, I would argue in response that both the blog and the website are updated on a fairly limited basis and I’m/you’re not following the encounter twitter feed because you want to get to know someone better – it’s setup as a “news/announcement/prayer feed” for folks interested in encounter.

So there you have it. What say you?

[/rant]

I better post a link to this via twitter to be sure everyone knows about it and responds. 🙂

[rant continued]

update :: I also hate reading RSS feeds that don’t show the entire blog post. I don’t want to have to click “read more” or “this post continues elsewhere.” Just put the entire blog post in your RSS feed — PLEASE! I’m dumping a lot of RSS feeds right now that make me click on another link to read — it makes the entire point of RSS rather pointless.

[/rant]