This morning @kentbrew tweeted that he found much to agree with Tim Maly's Unlink your feeds manifesto. Good Mr. Maly notes that with the proliferation of services intent on letting you inform everyone you know what your cat had for breakfast this morning, there's an increasing liklihood you're spamming your friends rather than being helpful. Granted, it's something i'm well aware of.
Being a community geek, i have presence on just about everything out there, Friendfeed, Twitter, Yahoo, Yelp, Facebook, even Google Buzz. Shortly after buzz showed up, i started cross linking everything in hopes of setting up a feedback loop where Friendfeed tweets to Facebook that i've posted a buzz about a Friendfeed update. Sadly, i was not more evil than someone diligent programmer out there since the echo loop failed to materialize. It still doesn't mean that i wasn't well aware of what i was doing, which means that there's the equal chance that any number of folks would duplicate what i did with absolutely no knowledge they were doing it.
Getting back to Kent's tweet, i agreed with it, noting that if it wasn't for a few similar feedback loops i'd built up i'd never post to some services. Then @MikeHart (who is not only intellectually acute and a snazzy dresser but also the guy that signs my paychecks) noted that the best thing would be for various aggregators to provide a way for folks to manage their own collection of who they follow, as well as what bits they want to ignore. It's true, and some services actually provide it, but i can't help think that this is just like email used to be.
Back in the early Jurassic, when you had to fork over good cash for a 33k baud modem, there were several big services that all offered the "Internet". Only problem was that there was an inverse relationship between how "consumer friendly" they were vs. how much "Internet" you were allowed to have. CompuServe was the most open allowing members to freely set up completely opaque email addresses like "192813.448172@compuserve.com", view gopher sites and all sorts of crap that would confuse the hell out of anyone not familiar with a TCP stack. On the opposite side, there was Prodigy, created by Sears, IBM and CBS and was the proto-AOL / Complete Digital Portal where Mom could store recipes, Dad could follow golf scores, and Junior could get help with his math homework. The Internet was kinda there, if you looked the right way and gave the secret knock, but why would you want to since Everything you Want is Here. Stuck somewhere between the extremes was GEnie.
Each of these were built so you could easily send messages to folks on your own service, and maybe another one. SMTP was around for quite some time, so it wasn't a technical limitation. They just wanted to keep you on their site so they could charge advertisers more and boost their numbers. (Sound familiar?) What broke the web free was not only the introduction of HTTP, but the fact that the folks ponying up for these services were geeky nerds that demanded the ability to email others. There was a darn good reason why CompuServe was the leading service even though it was the least "friendly" service, because the folks most likely to use it were geeks.
These companies didn't embrace openness, they acquiesced to market driven forces.
Today, we have great efforts being made in things like ActivityStreams, OpenID, and other like protocols all trying to step up and be the way that you share your cat's breakfast. They're great ideas, and certainly something i long for. In some respects, Google is right. Status updates, tweets, micro-blogs or whatever you want to call them are just another form of messaging, just with a larger, more public aspect to them. Some folks are fans of having all of that lumped together. i prefer having some context and thus have rules set up for how and when i browse that sort of thing. In many respects, i view it as another of my many email addresses, which i distribute to various services so they can self-select if i think they're important or not.
Only we don't really have that.
Although i don't use it, i'll grant that right now Facebook has the best control mechanism for aggregation. You can block posts from individuals or from apps posting on their behalf. It's also the least usable since the only way to consume that stream is to be on Facebook. It's a bit like saying "Well, you can pick what flavors of water go into the firehose." Like Prodigy, there's little incentive for facebook to allow you to consume your friends activities outside of facebook, and tons of reasons to not provide it.
Only, this time, the market forces aren't being driven by geeks. Of the tens of millions of heavy Facebook users, a microscopic fraction of which are geeks even aware of things like ActivityStreams or OpenID. If they were to go somewhere else, they'd hardly be noticed. i don't doubt for a second that if ActivityStreams ever really caught on, facebook would have a means for you to include them into your Facebook stream. Just don't expect them to reciprocate.
And we end this journey kind of where we started. All those services i noted before feed into my facebook news stream. i do this because i know there are some folks that only live in that world. Sadly, if a heated discussion were to break out around anything i have cross-posted into facebook, i'll probably never know about it. Facebook is a black hole as far as i'm concerned. Stuff goes in, but never comes out. (While i can link to things, you can't always see them for any number of reasons, unless i completely bypass facebook and do things like this: 
)
Sorry Mr. Maly, while i agree with your manifesto and dream of a day where i can run my own client with my own rules about determining what news i want to see, i'm going to have to keep spamming at least one group of "friends".
