Can Sites Be Too Interconnected?

2009 May 7
by Teeg

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Plaxo and Plurk sync with Twitter and Facebook.

Friendfeed draws from most social sites and sends out to Twitter.

Facebook draws from Twitter, Friendfeed, StumbleUpon, Plurk, your blog, and any other site that has a Facebook app.

Ping sends your thoughts to any site you have registered with it.

And on and on.Norwegian Road Sign

There are many times when it’s nice that you don’t have to visit every single site every day in order to be active.

But if you’re not careful you can run into double post (or Arrrgh! even worse, triple post) issues. Like the time I forgot that long ago I had set up Plaxo to post to Twitter. AND I had set Plurk to post to Twitter. And then I decided to try Ping.fm, which posts to Plaxo, Plurk, AND Twitter.

Or yesterday, when I tweeted, and with the new Friendfeed settings, my tweet was sent back to twitter.

Of course, Friendfeed brings up even more issues.

Although there’s a core group of friends that is similar between many social sites, I still have a lot of unique friends on the sites I’m most active on. And if I find something I want to share with all of them, Friendfeed soon starts to look overrun, especially with the new real time posts.

It’s not just a problem with me, I’ve noticed many times people want to share something interesting on all the sites they’re on, whether they’re using Ping to post everywhere at once or posting to each site individually.

Let’s say for example, that I find an interesting article about social media. I stumble it, which is my first reaction with any interesting page I come across, then, if I think friends from different groups will enjoy it, I’ll post about it on Ping. I might also post it on a voting site, but the sharing problem isn’t as obvious there, so I’ll leave them alone for now.

Depending on my settings, when I stumble a page, Friendfeed and Facebook will both share it. With Friendfeed’s new settings on default, the stumble will also be announced over Twitter.

By sharing the site on Ping, I’m multiplying the number of times it will be shared on Friendfeed and through them, to Facebook and Twitter. Yes, I’ve tweaked my settings now, but how many people think to change from the default at first?

No real answers today, just thoughts and questions. What do you think, can sites be too interconnected? Was it better when Friendfeed grouped all similar posts together, or do you like seeing each individual site’s post show up in “real” time?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions!

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from → Social Media

  • Some great questions...I admit to being a little overwhelmed still with the sheer numbers and permutations of connections. Figuring this out and managing it would be a full time job IMO!
    One thing I do notice is that the sites that allow for posting across different social sites can sometimes lead to posts that don't get your full attention. Sometimes I think it is better not to broadcast post. Sometimes those broadcasts result in getting comments that you either can't get back to or forget to respond in kind.

    <abbr>Kelis last blog post..What’s Your Story? Part I</abbr>
  • I apologize for the overuse of "sometimes"!

    <abbr>Kelis last blog post..What’s Your Story? Part I</abbr>
  • I certainly agree they can be too interconnected. Although linking my social networks would increase my quantity, I don't think it would improve my quality. I tailor all my posts to the network, audience, and my needs/wants from that community. There's no one-size-fits-all!
  • Interesting thoughts! It's certainly true that keeping this all sorted out, makes it more worthwhile to pursue. But seeing all of the connections correctly is difficult for me. In fact, now that you've started me thinking about this (again, after previous experimentation with what feeds into what), I think I'm going to produce a MindMap to help me visualize what SHOULD be interconnected, as well as help to identify redundancies that cause double or triple posting, as well as sort out the dead ends, since with somewhere in the vicinity of 30 or more social networking accounts... it's complex enough that I can't even come up with an answer to your question yet. What I feel certain about at this point, is that it does matter, and I should update in the most efficient (& least boring way) possible.
  • Teeg
    @Keli, I am only now changing my opinion on this, after fussing about multipost sites for a while.

    For sites that I don't visit often, it's nice to be able to have an easy way to change my status, so when I visit them, I don't see something like "More snow on the way! I'm desperate, what's your favorite snow activity." when it's 100 degrees outside and the air conditioner can't keep up with how fast the house is heating up.

    For sites like Plurk and twitter on the other hand, I very much prefer individual posts and enjoy communicating with people who are going to be around sometime in the near future, to communicate back (unless they fall asleep while trying to get their little one to rest). :)
  • Teeg
    @PABlo I would really, really love to see that MindMap when you finish with it. I'm still trying to decide what I really want connected...and wishing someone would connect things the way I want them to be (ie only draw from my SU blog instead of from all the links I thumb up).

    For the time being, I had to keep FriendFeed from posting to twitter to get rid of all the double posting. It's not an ideal set-up, but gets rid of all the doubles, so it will stay this way until I figure exactly what I want posting to where, and how to make that happen. :)
  • Teeg
    @Kara Good points. The only site where I post in fairly large quantity is StumbleUpon, and I've removed it from most of the sharing sites simply because I can't determine which stumbles are shown (I use SU as a combination book marker and blog...I doubt most people want to see all the sites I bookmark although I wouldn't mind being able to just share the blog part).
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