Do you remember IRC?  For those of us that used it regularly, one of the things that made it unusable were bots. These are software programs that repeat the same message again and again. 

Have you tried Yahoo chat rooms ever?  They've taken over and made that platform pretty much unusable as well.

Now that we've taken to twitter as the communication channel of the day, I'm thinking that the increasing use of tools like twitterfeed are going to make twitter unusable. 

In case you don't know, twitterfeed is a tool that lets you setup a pipeline such that a tweet gets sent to your followers every time you do something whether it's upload a picture to flickr, digg an article, or share an item in google reader.  [There are other similar tools but twitterfeed is by far the most popular.]

While this sounds like a good idea, let's think about this.  Twitter has a limit of 140 characters.  It doesn't take very long to construct a tweet message that communicates exactly what you want.  What is the real benefit of having your tweets generated automatically other than cutting your voice out of the process?

What does it say about your followers that you are willing to pass along tweets without taking the minute to review? 

I'm only speaking from experience here. I signed up for twitterfeed and had it autotweet my flickr stream.  I very quickly realized, actually it was brought to my attention by a follower, that twitterfeed tweets were noisy as heck and not pleasant for my followers.

So I killed my twitterfeed and the impact has been nil.  If I have something to post, I craft my 140 characters and get to the point.

Thoughts?  Twitterfeed and related services a blessing or a curse?

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