The continuing evolution of Internet etiquette

[mithriltabby]

There’s an interesting blog, Unlink Your Feeds, with a manifesto calling for unlinking feeds between different web services. And it raises a rather interesting dilemma: some of us are heavy Internet users who are on a bunch of different services; others are only on one or two. How to reach the people who are only on one or two services without dumping huge amounts of redundant information in the laps of the more heavily connected?

My current practice is to distinguish between primary sources and aggregators. I have many primary sources: I use my LiveJournal any time I want to go into depth and have a real discussion about matters; that’s regular blogging. I use my Twitter account for microblogging. I review books on my LibraryThing, and aggregate them here to facilitate discussion (since most folks here wanted it that way), but I don’t tweet about the book reviews or posts to my LJ. I review local businesses on my Yelp account, and save bookmarks on Delicious. Anything that I find interesting while perusing my many RSS feeds on Google Reader goes into my shared items there; sometimes they’ll show up on my Delicious account as well if I want to remember them later, but mostly it’s just putting interesting things into a stream for people to follow if they wish.

Aggregators, on the other hand, are platforms to which I never post directly, and just set up a feed from a primary source. Since Facebook is a microblogging platform, I send my Twitter posts to my Facebook account; same with Google Buzz. LiveJournal isn’t for microblogging, so I don’t use the service to put the day’s tweets into an LJ post. The only new content you’ll see from me on an aggregator platform is my replies to others’ posts.

My home page pulls in everything that I can inline into a web browser, partly as an exercise to keep my web coding skills from rusting up completely and partly as a way of advertising the feeds as something more than meta tags and icons on the page.

Comments

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

I think you are actually one of the reasonable ones about it. When one is scattered all over the place, occasionally having things linked up means that I get a chance to see something that I missed in another location.
Like I saw this item in Buzz which you have linked to LJ.
And I actually don't mind friends sending their tweets to LJ either. I don't always see everything in twitter, and I can quickly scan to see if there is anything I Really Need To Know.
And I just friended you over at Yelp, the only service I hadn't found you in yet. :D
I look at this whole thing as Network - A Web! - And if I've read something somewhere else, I just scan and say done and go to the next thing.
Like this blog, which I found on Buzz and then came here to respond. I will probably run into it again on LJ, and I'll just glance and think "There it is" and go on. No Problem.
Still debating within myself how much I want to entangle all these services. But that is everyone's internal question.