Can I shove this fire hose down your throat?

Don’t get me wrong – I get what this social media idea is all about. It can be great stuff; much like the hippies painting flowers on their cheeks and putting flowers in gun barrels. The idea that we are living in an electronic world built around the concept of free thought and transparent sharing is idyllic. The premise that we can access all kinds of software via the browser (even if they are a boring as hell) for free is a Utopian dream even though we have to have all our data parsed to feed the advertising engine driving this utopia. The fact that communication around the world has become almost instantaneous and real time can boggle the mind but we now do it everyday. We have made it so that the web is becoming a giant global hen party with everyone nattering at the same time. The fire hose of information and inter-communication is ever turned on and getting bigger everyday.

In this aspect Twitter has forever changed the communication landscape of Web 2.0; if they can find a way to keep the lights on that is. It is in a way becoming the main gateway of our online communication. When used in conjunction with services like FriendFeed that can import your Twitter stream; and reply to that stream, management of your lifestreaming (and I still hate that term) is made a little easier. However yesterday FriendFeed turned on a feature that has the potential to turn everything within that lifestream into nothing more than total white noise.

The idea is that from FriendFeed you will now be able to post to Twitter everything that comes in through your FriendFeed pipe. Say what? Just take a look at my current settings for FriendFeed of stuff that would be re-piped into my Twitter stream

In other words depending on the items I select to punish you with I could literally drown my Twitter stream and the poor suffering people subscribed to it with stuff they didn’t sign up for. Sure, sure they can always unsubscribe from your feed but isn’t that defeating the whole purpose of why you have the Twitter stream in the first place. People are signing up to your Twitter stream because they want to either hear what you are thinking about, what you are finding interesting or to be able to talk with you. They didn’t sign up for your activity that is happening anywhere else other than Twitter – if they wanted that they’d join you on somewhere like FriendFeed or Strands.

Sorry but enabling this feature would be nothing short of committing Twitter suicide.