Cross-Site-… Cheeping?

In the past few weeks I’ve noticed that more and more people I’m friends with on all kind of different platforms use these modern ways of expressing themselves and communicating with some kind of batch-canon-behavior. Everywhere you look, you see the same messages, regardless of whether they fit into the platform’s context or not.

For example, on Twitter it’s possible to personalize messages by inserting the user it’s destined for with an @ as prefix. By using applications which spread the Twitter status-messages all over the net, you begin to see posts from the very same person on platforms like Facebook, where the @user doesn’t make any sense. Also it’s a matter of syntax: While Twitter allows you to write messages the way you want to write them, Facebook forces you (by placing your Name in front of the actual status-message) to use sentences like “has gone away.”, “is finally back home”, et cetera. Since many people now seem to be using Twitter as primary input-channel, you often get to see Facebook messages that look like John Doe Going now to bed. – what’s really ugly and doesn’t make sense in any kind.

I’m asking why? Why do people need to spread one and the same message over dozens of web-platforms? Why can’t they just personalize each message to not make the other “friends” think it’s just another-useless-nonsense-mass-message?

I mean, come on. What’s the deal with multiple platforms then? I still keep each platform personalized and decide what information I would write on what platform. I mean, maybe the circle of followers of my Twitter account (where I personally have more techies than regular people) aren’t interested in reading about stuff I would write to my “normal” friends in Facebook – and the other way around. And as I just said, by making Twitter (or whatever other service) the first input-channel, people kinda stop caring about the other platforms they spread their information at – so it’s actually useless to comment on their status on other platforms than Twitter.

Of course, one could argue of this being a time problem, since he/she would not have the time to write messages into each platform separately – but I mean, why is he/she then registered on every web-community existing on the internet? If time only allows me the usage of one service, I choose the one that fits best for my needs and keep using it.

I think otherwise the whole idea of different platforms is for the birds – why not creating one huge web-community which includes every platform like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. into one service, so nobody would need to spread the information anymore onto ten different services.

Hmpf… oh well.