International Law

Justin Williams rails against the noise of Web 2.0:

I love the fact that Web software has become more social. Being able to see what music my friends are listening to on Last.fm or what they?re up to on Twitter has enriched my life and helped me get to know my friends and colleagues in ways I may not have before.

With these new applications, however, comes disconnect. Our data is on dozens of sites and for some it may be hard to keep track of every little thing you do online.

THAT IS OK.

If I am subscribed to your Twitter feed and not to your blog, it probably means I think what you?re writing is shit and I don?t want to waste my time on it. I do, however, find your tweets to be interesting, so please keep on Twittering.

I think we are at a point where this stuff is still being worked out. In a way, it?s like when a new design style is introduced. How many sites are now using that awful Lightbox technique (even PocketTweets.com does)? We feel some sort of internal need to share every single bit of our lives through every avenue we are afforded to ensure that every single person we?re connected to sees what we do.

Rest assured.  You are not that important.

There should be a set of best practices for social software usage.  If it did exist, I?m sure it would go something like this.

1. Your Twitter friends do not care when you have a new blog post, update your Flickr or post a new link to del.icio.us.
2. If you do have a link that is relevant to a discussion that points to your blog, it?s OK to cross-post it.  Stay on topic.
3. Your Tumblr subscribers do not want to be updated everytime you post a new tweet on Twitter.
4. Your friends will find you on the sites they are interested in joining.  You don?t need to spam other sites with crossed data.
5. Embrace services like FriendFeed and SocialThing if you want to aggregate everything. 
6. (Bonus) Sending over 200 messages on Twitter in a span of 3 hours is completely unacceptable and an abuse of your status.

It?s my hope that sites like SocialThing and FriendFeed eliminate the prevalence of this annoying habit of cross-polluting multiple sites with the same content. Until then, I?ll just keep hitting my unsubscribe button on the overzealous few.

Read more here.  (Hat tip: Anthony Dever.)