Of late, I’ve been a very heavy consumer of social media and eagerly look forward to links, pictures and other stuff that my friends share online. The reason I pursue such content is because I value my friends’ tastes and hope to discover new things through them. I click through to most reasonable sounding links in my social stream and am rewarded more often than not.
It then pisses me to no end, when some of my contacts digg stories from their own blogs, or share stories from their own blog on Google Reader. The entry title more often than not is ambiguous, and its hard to tell who wrote the article.
I feel tricked when I discover that the cool story that you just dugg or shared through Google reader wasn’t something good you found online but something only you believe to be great, and just want to plug. If I’m really interested in what you write, I’ll read your blog. Just stop spamming them pipes.
Don’t get me wrong – It is absolutely cool to plug stuff from your own blog into your Twitter posts or Facebook Notes, for example. Those services are meant for people to communicate with their friends and self plugs are fair game there. As a matter of fact, I suppose Twitter Tools is going to crosspost a link to this blog post on Twitter clearly mentioning it as such.
But then, Digg is meant for for people to indicate appreciation of other people’s stuff. Google reader is meant for people to share interesting stories written by other people. Delicious is meant for sharing interesting links that you come across on the web. None of these are ideally meant to be used as self-advertising platforms.
Abusing your social stream isn’t good internet etiquette. So stop when you can.