Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 : Internet Tech

Feed Publishing’s been a tricky thing to tweak on FriendFeed to reduce the noise I spread to Twitter. I like sharing my activity on Twitter on the web, but like interacting with the web over various interfaces … I guess you can say I’m a tad bit of an Internet addict.

After some careful mapping and planning, I came up with a simple mess of how I do things, perhaps it’ll help you if you’re doing the same:

1. Select: Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation (does not apply to comments) – This is most important. If you’re sharing a link on FriendFeed to Twitter, share the link, not the FriendFeed post.
2. Include: Entries I post in public rooms
3. Include: Comments that I make on public FriendFeed entries
4. Exclude: Public FriendFeed entries that I ‘Like’ – this was a simple choice, I tend to “Like” a lot more entries than I comment on, but also – I use the ‘Like’ feature on FriendFeed primarily as a mini-bookmarking system. I’ll return to a post later when I have more time to get into it & either leave my Like or remove it based on whether or not I actually like it, to stay truer to the feature.
5. Select Post Entries from – The services I’ve selected below:

• Uncheck: FriendFeed – I don’t use FriendFeed as a sounding board, I’ll either tweet, tumble, or blog about something depending on how much I have to say about something (like this). All services of which go to FriendFeed just fine. If and when I start getting comments on my posts, I may reconsider, but right now – it doubles up FriendFeed posts & comments in the time line and that’s unacceptable to me.
• Blog RSS – For the blog or blogs you do have – there’s no reason to not share with people when you make a new post. This site and Sociosophy are listed under my FriendFeed. Even though Sociosophy has it’s own twitter profile and FriendFeed, that network is ac; I consider this “redundancy” an acceptable form of noise. I’ll even retweet things from Socisophy at times – which is deliberately noisy, and if that bothers people, I have yet to hear about it.
• Bookmarking Services – If you use 7 bookmarking services and bookmark everything seven times, pick one of these services to share to Twitter, preferably the one that you comment/review the link on, so it’ll have some substance as to why you’re sharing it.
• Disqus – Using Disqus is great, I hear there are drawbacks, but I have yet to actually see them. Especially when interacting with comments on your own blog, let’s face it, not everyone in the world is looking over my site (or yours) for new comments, so broadcasting that interaction, depending on frequency, isn’t a bad thing either.
• Calendar/Events Sites – If you’re really into letting people know where you are and what you’re doing, nothin’ says “stalk me” like making sure you’re entire echo chamber knows exactly where you are on nights you’re RSVP’d for an event someplace.

YouTube and video sites I avoid, for a few reasons, but mainly because of how I use them. Not Being a vlogger – primarily, most of my YouTube content comes from Qik.com while streaming from my N95, now N96 for the time being. Well, Qik.com tweets when I’m live… to minimize duplication, turning that off was a step in the right direction.

Of course this doesn’t cover all the bases, but the main trick is, turning off the FriendFeed entries, but include comments from Public rooms/entries. Also, be wary of including services that lean on Twitter, such as Qik, BrightKite, 12 seconds, other microblogging services… and pretty much anything that allows you to post your interactions to Twitter. Seems sort of “common sense” of “common practice” the more I think about it, but with some small attention to details and knowledge of your account communications? Streamlining this feature within FriendFeed is most useful and thus most excellent.