Facebook Chaos (or why I should have never linked my FB and Twitter accounts)

A little warning: At least half of this post is just me thinking aloud.

My hiatus from Facebook lasted all of several days.

It was great while it lasted and I managed to get a tonne of stuff done, but then I decided that I'd quite like to share some of that stuff and promptly reactivated my account.

Doing so got me thinking about just how much stuff (some of it utter nonsense) I subject my Twitter followers and Facebook friends to on a regular basis.

What's more, it got me thinking about which of my social media profiles talk to each other and, especially on Facebook, make me sound like I'm repeating myself.

It's my own fault; if a service asks me if I'd like to connect with Twitter, I think 'sure, why not?', but then if it also asks me if I want to connect with Facebook, it never occurs to me that I don't need to, since Twitter will tell FB everything anyway.

My Tumblr account is pretty bad for this. Every time I update it, it tells Facebook, then it tells Twitter, which tells Facebook, which makes me sound like I'm repeating myself.

I'll admit, dear reader, that I became a bit of obsessed with just how chaotic things were getting. So, at Stupid O' Clock in the morning when I really should have been asleep, I sat down with bubbl.us and came up with this little diagram to show where everything was going. (you may need to zoom out a notch or two to view this properly)

It looks a mess, partly because I put it all together when I should have been asleep, but mostly because, well, it is a mess.

The thick black lines represent profiles which talk to each other directly, the thin grey lines represent profiles which end up talking to each other by way of another service.

For example, My Foursquare account is directly linked to my Twitter, but because my Twitter and Facebook accounts are linked, friends on Facebook get my latest updates from that account too.

If I love a song on Last.Fm, it tells Twitter, which tells Facebook. If I update this blog, Blogger tells Facebook directly, but then it also tells Twitter, which also tells Facebook, and so on.

All of this means that friends on Facebook are bombarded with my updates from eight different sources (not to mention all the times I'll directly share articles I've produced, videos I've found etc), most of which they don't care about.

Five of those sources come as a result of Twitter talking to Facebook.

And so, through all the chaos, I have come to a simple conclusion, which is this:

Linking Facebook and Twitter accounts is a bad idea, and I should separate mine the second I'm done posting this.