CarpeAqua has hit the nail on the head (thanks for the link, Ryan).
Our data is on dozens of sites and for some it may be hard to keep track of every little thing you do online. [...] We feel some sort of internal need to share every single bit of our lives through every avenue we are afforded to ensure that every single person we’re connected to sees what we do. Rest assured. You are not that important. [...] Your friends will find you on the sites they are interested in joining. You don’t need to spam other sites with crossed data.
– CarpeAqua // Your Twitter is not your Blog is not your Tumblr is not your FriendFeed
Many of you think I’m a bit nuts for obsessing about separation like I do. Well, this is it! This is exactly why! Let’s say that, by chance, Mr. CarpeAqua finds my photography absolutely amazing but, despite that, he has no interest in knowing that I had no water this morning when I woke up. Maybe he could care less about my troubles with Portable Ubuntu, but finds my writing regarding my own internal struggles coping with a hectic life an an overactive brain (unlocked just to link here) incredibly interesting and enlightening. I’d rather know that he is uninterested in some aspects of me and that he is taking the bits and pieces of me that he enjoys and engaging himself fully in that than to know that he is so overwhelmed with information from me that he has no choice but to ignore it all.
I understand the need to cross-post data in cases where two services overlap and you want to participate in both. For instance, I want to share my photography with the Flickr community, the VFXY community, and with the LiveJournal community. So I post in my photoblog, and cross post to accounts on each of those services. But I try to do so in a way that separates content, either with communities, or with separate accounts entirely.
I’ve seen people doing this between Pownce and Twitter or between their blog and their LiveJournal account. This makes sense. In each of these cases the syndicated content is either a copy of the original, excerpts linking back to the original, or a subset of the original. It’s not a situation where multiple sites and multiple services are dumping all manner of content into one pile of madness. Imagine if my LiveJournal updated every time I posted a Tweet?
For those places where the lines are a little blurry I like digest posts. If I have a blog about my life, and I also happen to use Twitter to account for a very detailed breakdown of my life, making a digest of Twitter posts in the blog about my Life just makes sense. If I happen to use Tumblr to post interesting tidbits of interest to Technically minded people, then a digest of that finding its way to my Technical blog makes sense.
Having all of your content in every place all of the time is just silly, wasteful, complicated, and annoying. But, if that’s what you want, there are services that do this and do it well, like FriendFeed. Taking a look at my FriendFeed, you can see how annoying having everything in one place might be for someone who was only interested in black and white photography of the female form. But, of course, if you want EVERYTHING, then FriendFeed works for you.
So yeah. Reading the thoughts of others on this has encouraged me to separate even more. If you can’t handle a few more adds to your LiveJournal friends list or a few more notches in your Google Reader, then maybe you aren’t all that interested in the first place.