FriendFeed announced that they are now enabling their users to post their updates to Twitter. Overall, the idea could flood Twitter with a lot of out of context information. Granted, this is not any different than most of the content on Twitter, but now people could be getting comments on other FriendFeed posts in their Twitter feed. Obviously, it sounds like chaos will ensue. This will not happen because of the way this feature was implemented.

First, for any update, FriendFeed appends a shortened url for their own threads in the form of http://ff.im/rt. This is not a public service yet, but it provides the context that some people may need to understand what is being said. This is an excellent idea, and they have avoided the dependence on a third party url shortener like tinyurl.com.

The initial reactions I have seen on this feature have been mixed, but they have placed the power in the users’ hands. I have setup my account specifically to only post those items that I post directly to FriendFeed. This allows me to use FriendFeed purely as a Twitter client and not flood my Twitter account with my StumbleUpon or Delicious updates. Imagine if I started publishing my Google Reader shares to Twitter using this FriendFeed feature. I probably average a tweet or two per day right now. If you included my Reader shares, my average would be about 45 tweets per day! Do you really want to see that?

So, what do my settings really look like for this feature? If you look at the image on the right, you can see that I have selected to include “Entries I post in public rooms”, but I did not select the comments option. For the services to post from, I only selected FriendFeed. Leave all of the other services unchecked, and you will not flood Twitter with the various others service updates. Does this sound good to you, or did I miss any important service? Now I just need to have FriendFeed automatically add my Twitter subscriptions.