things that amuse me

Twitter is a great way to let people know you wrote something and to ask for their feedback. That doesn’t mean EVERY SINGLE THING YOU WRITE EVER should be automatically imported into Twitter. Please don’t do this.

Feel free to let us know, on occasion, if you’ve written something you’d like us to see. You may have gotten new followers who haven’t yet seen your blog. Someone might not have liked the content you wrote before, but might be a convert now. The point is, once we go to your blog to see what you wrote, we will either subscribe to your RSS feed, or we will decide it’s not something we’re interested in seeing more about.

If we subscribed to your RSS feed you are spamming us with your notifications in Twitter. We will see it on Twitter, then we will see it again in our RSS Readers. You are polluting our information stream with your extraneous repetitive data, and this is annoying.

If we did not subscribe to your RSS feed it was because we didn’t want to be notified every time you post a blog entry. Enough said.

How many of us have followed someone in Twitter, then found their blog, subscribed to the feed, only to find they import their tweets into their blog’s RSS feed? We get their tweets in Twitter, we get notifications of their blog entries from Twitter, we get their tweets again, later, in our RSS reader, and we see the notifications of new blog entries again in our RSS reader.

I tried just following someone like this in RSS. Tweets are annoying, to me, to read in my RSS reader. I tried just following them in Twitter. Having too many tweets that link me off elsewhere turns out to be too annoying for me as well. I stopped following the person altogether.

I’m all for showing your tweets in other ways than just through Twitter. Just don’t include them in the same RSS feed as your blog entries. Honor people’s right to make a choice. Don’t force yourself on everyone. You don’t want to be that person.