stormbrew

Every now and then I find someone interesting to follow on twitter because of the links they post. Finding interesting links is a big part of why I use Twitter. It makes it so the links come to me with very little action on my part (thus fitting in nicely with the my lazy side). The other ways I know of to get links don’t really do it for me.

I’ve heard Twitter described as RSS 3.0, and I’d agree with that assessment. Twitter allows me to get new information on the basis of an ad-hoc network of people filtering that information. I follow people who are interested in similar things (and they do and so on) and bits of information get into my feed through retweets as well as original discoveries. In this way, all Twitter users are basically like the coffee beans in a coffee maker. A whole bunch of information (water) is poured in at the top, it gets absorbed into us, added to, and passed on, and then my follow list acts as a filter on the result. The disgusting gunk that’s left in the filter gets thrown out.

RSS, on the other hand, requires me to go to information sources and subscribe to them. I get either no diversity in this mechanism (just blog posts by the same people all the time) or far too much diversity (by following an rss feed aggregation that tends to include everything new under the sun — see also Digg/Slashdot — with no filtering at all). Twitter — and presumably other services like it — strike a perfect balance by allowing me to choose who I want to listen to. It’s a bit like finding your favorite movie reviewers and ignoring all the rest.

But sometimes there are threats to this filtering. Stuff like #moonfruit is one — by jamming as much noise into the pipeline as possible, it makes it hard to find any signal. Another, in my opinion, is FriendFeed. When someone uses FriendFeed as a client to Twitter, it does this very painful thing where it will turn links into ff.im links. Nothing wrong with a url shortener, but this one does something a little more.

Ff.im links have the painful problem of forcing me to go to a FriendFeed landing page before visiting the content. I have to be subjected to comments about a page I haven’t even seen yet before I can actually see the page. Not only does this not make sense, it also frustrates me. I get a lot of new links to look at on my twitter feed every day, and I almost never follow these ones all the way through to the content. At the moment of click, I usually know so little about the target that it’s just not worth it.

A big part of this is laziness, of course. I already admitted I am lazy above. But it goes a bit beyond that. FriendFeed is essentially advertising to me (I don’t mean banners, I mean they’re advertising their site/service to me) on every link that gets posted through them to twitter. As a non-user of their site (and I never will be one so long as they do this), I did not consent to be advertised to by them. Now that I recognize ff.im links for what they are, I just don’t follow them. And if someone I follow has this happen a lot on links I would otherwise be interested in, I unfollow them.

The first notable case of this was @Scobleizer, who provided a lot of the interesting links I read when I first joined twitter, but at some point all his links became ff.im links. I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t care about this (I’m well known to care about things like this more than most people), but I’m sure there are also a lot of people out there who find this as frustrating and destructive as I do.

If FriendFeed really needs to tack on content to pages I view through their links, could they at least make it more like Facebook or Digg’s, with the bar along the top? As much as I despise those sorts of things too, they would be a huge improvement over being forced into an interstitial every time I click a link off twitter. Show me how many comments there are, allow me to expand that frame, and I’d probably sometimes even look.