Shouldn't Twitter be able to do exactly what FriendFeed does?
I've started using FriendFeed. Not as a consumer of different people's feeds (because there is just way too much information), but because I can now point people to one location (https://friendfeed.com/anandiyer) where most of my different social networking services' activities are getting aggregated. I really like it for that purpose. However, shouldn't Twitter be able to accomplish exactly the same thing? TwitterFeed, for example, can be configured to ping your blog and post tweets about your blog posts. Why can't Twitter ask you which services you use, ping those services for your activities, and then auto-tweet them for you?
Besides, I can see how I'm probably inundating my friends on friendfeed (lets call them 'friendfeeders') :
- I've configured Twhirl, a client I use to Twitter, to auto-post my tweets to Pownce. So if you go to my friendfeed feed, you're likely to see duplicate messages :
- At one point, I'd started using TwitterFeed. Some my friendfeeders, saw my blog post on FriendFeed. And, TwitterFeed tweet'd (or is it twittered? ) it, which means it showed up a couple of times on my friendfeed. I've stopped using TwitterFeed.
- Every now and then I send cute tweets about a blog post that contained a picture on Flickr (much like this blog post will). So, my friendfeeders saw my Flickr photo go up, they saw my tweet about my Flickr photo, and they saw my blog post with my Flickr photo, and my tweet about my blog post with my flickr photo.
Twitter can (and should) be the non-walled garden for aggregating data from different social networking services. I also find Twitter's RSS feed more superior than FriendFeed's. If not for anything else, it'll save us the trouble of having
- yet another account (which means managing credentials) on a site like FriendFeed (or SocialThing), and,
- a group of friends on another service.
"ai"
PS: I'm going to be twhirling this post. So you're likely going to see it show up thrice on my friendfeed :|