Single-purpose streams.

When I explained that linking your feeds is hurting your friends, I flippantly suggested people who aren’t following you on that other service are probably ignoring you for a reason. While I’m still ready to argue that this is generally true, I don’t want to claim that it’s always true.

Somewhere among the horde of people who aren’t following you because they don’t like you, aren’t following you because they don’t like how you use the service, and aren’t following you because they hate everything the service represents, there is a small huddled group. These unfortunates would like to follow your updates on that other service but for one reason or another, the prospect of having to check yet another inbox drives them to tears. I can’t say that I blame them.

How to accommodate this group without driving all your other followers to distraction and riot?

My first answer is handcrafted updates. Choose your most important messages and post them in medium-appropriate ways on each service. This answer is cheating. It doesn’t meet the parameters I specified above: what if someone wants to read everything you post to that other service, but they can’t bear to sign up for that other service?

The real answer is right up there in the title of this post: instead of everything boxes, publish single-purpose streams. If you must dump everything you post from one service into another, have the decency to do it in a separate account that the rest of us can happily ignore or subscribe to as we see fit.

While I get the sentiment, I respectfully disagree with TwitterIsntRSS.com. I think that there is no harm in allowing people who want to use Twitter as an RSS reader the option to do that. Just don’t bundle it all together and drown the rest of us.

The goal here is the same as always: give your friends/followers/attractive people fine-grained control of their user-experience. If they want to keep up with your blog on Twitter instead of inside an RSS reader, more power to them. If they’d rather get an email, so much the better. By all means, publish widely. Let us decide where and how to keep up with your insights and cat pictures.

Here’s the mantra: Time is precious, accounts are free.

Unlink your feeds.