Marco.org

Nicklog on feed-importing:

Embracing the idea of simplicity, I have removed all of my imported Facebook feeds — including Twitter, delicious, and digg. With the exception of Flickr, I feel that these feeds have no relevancy to Facebook, nor to any of my contacts on Facebook.

[…]

The essence is that Facebook is not for all of these things.

I completely agree. There’s a contextual disconnect between different services.

I might care about what you have to say on Tumblr in our format and our context. That doesn’t mean that I care about how drunk you are while waiting in line for your breakfast (Twitter), and I’m probably not interested in seeing all 50 of your vacation photos (Flickr). Your closer friends probably do want to see that, but they might not care to read 2 paragraphs of your opinions on economic policy and philosophy on Tumblr.

Very few of my real-life friends read my tumblelog, but very few of my Tumblr followers are real-life friends. It’s a different context with which I provide different content to a different audience.

It doesn’t need to be this way, of course — plenty of people maintain more personal tumblelogs than I do, and their real-life friends read them. But know your purpose and your audience. I want my tumblelog to be interesting to people who don’t know me, and I filter the content accordingly. If you intend to attract a larger audience, recognize that you’ll have to be selective — not just blindly and automatically dump all of your content in front of them.