And hey, why the heck haven’t you added me on Facebook?

If my Facebook friends want to be subjected to my tweets, it’s easy enough for them to follow me; I don’t want to force people into an “all or nothing” interest in my activities. Many of my friends would love to know when I’m going out on the town, but could care less when I post a geeky blog entry.

Same with my Flickr contacts; they heavily overlap with my Twitter friends already, but I have others who really just want to see my photos, not what I’m doing every few hours.

I have an audience at livejournal, facebook, myspace, twitter and a few other services. For the most part these audiences do not cross over and posting to all of them would take a significant amount of time. Especially since I make frequent status updates. I am open to additional suggestions.

I use SocialThing to monitor the majority of responses to these service postings and generally do not miss much. If I need to respond to someone I do so on the individual service.

While I apologize for people that do have to suffer through a bit of redundant posting the benefit for those that care about what is going on with me outweighs the inconvenience of others. I also slightly regret the coolness of that statement but it is the truth.

I admit that LinkedIn status updates were a poor choice but they are also very broken and that particular statement hung there forever. They are now removed.

Rant: I really despise LinkedIn and what it represents. I think that not hiring someone based on some outrageous comment/pic they made online creates a culture where you only hire people that are really good at hiding things. I have worked in these cultures of deceit several times and they have left a bad taste in my mouth.

If you’re going to push to these services, you gotta hang there. Otherwise, you’re just taking up space.

I rarely use Brightkite, but when I do, it is to post messages about a PLACE and view the stream of a PLACE. You know, the intended purpose.

Ping.fm is the “chew and screw” of social media.

Sure, Ping.fm is obviously a megaphone, but it’s an anti-social
megaphone. It lets people push updates to sites without visiting them
and seeing the activity their updates may have created. The systems it
integrates with are two-way channels, but Ping.fm treats them as one-way.

It bugs me the most with Brightkite, because Brightkite works best when
people are talking about actual places. “What’s happening around me?”
should return notes about specific places noting funny encounters,
things to try and see, etc., etc. But megaphoning turns it into simple
self-promotion. The fact that you don’t even have to be at/have checked
into a location to write about it is completely lost when using the site
in such a remote, lowest-common-denominator fashion.

In the end, I never respond to megaphone users unless I know where they
actually check in and listen back. Otherwise, they are valuable one-way
updates, I’ll just start ignoring them.