Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Pushing My Twits to Facebook Considered Harmful

Like many Twitter users, I always had a Facebook application setup to pull my twits and post them on Facebook as status updates. Thanks to this application, all my twits where making their way to Facebook, showing up in my friends' news feed. A couple of weeks ago, it became clear to me that there was a problem with pushing twits to my Facebook friends. So I stopped.

Why? Simply, because the little pieces of information I publish on Twitter are interesting to me, but let's be realistic: what is interesting to me is just that; interesting to me; most likely it isn't interesting to most people in general, and to my Facebook friends in particular. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is something pretentious of me forcing this information on my Facebook friends. Yes, I know, you can opt-out and "hide" some of your friends on Facebook, so their updates don't pollute your news feed. But many don't know about this feature or are reluctant to take this measure. I would rather see people opt-in, as they do on Twitter by voluntarily "following" someone, than force people to opt-out.

(Note that the title of this post is Pushing My Twits to Facebook Considered Harmful. Even if you are pushing your twits to Facebook, what I say here may not apply to you. But if this is something you are doing, you might want to ask yourself: "are my friends going to be interested in my twits?".)