The Unintended SPAM

It so happens I spam, without realizing it. No I do not send messages to unknown people, I spam my followers and friends. A lot of my friends/twitter followers are following me to read my technical posts, with no interest to my views on politics or pictures of my latest trip. Some on the other hand liked my views on anan hazare or rame sena, and have no interest in how great django or python is. And my family, well they just want to know when will I get married.

I am not the only one, almost everybody with twitter/facebook/blogs has this problem, people have more than one interests they want to write about. But people who read them are not interested in all their interests, just a few.

And no matter how informative, well written a post is, if it is not of my interest, it is SPAM(1).

This is one of the reasons I stopped using Google Reader and twitter. I followed people and blogs because I loved some of their posts, but the percentage of posts by them that appeals me is typically low, and this means majority of articles/posts are SPAM for me.

One solution for this is we have topic specific blog and twitter accounts, but that has very bad usability, now I have to maintain three login passwords on twitter, go to three different blog pages to review comments/spams etc etc.

Blogs do have topic specific RSS feed that I could subscribe, but there too the usability is a big problem. Lets say I liked your post and I subscribed to you on Google Reader, and in a week or so realize that 80% of your posts are not of my interest, there is nothing in Google Reader that lets me select only the topic I am interested in, I have to unsubscribe your main RSS feed, find RSS of the tag/category on your blog I like and subscribe it again.

In my opinion, these usability issues are the key reason I moved away from these services.

I am playing with an experiment of managing my followers though email list, where I have created groups each subscriber can add themselves to. In my case the groups are "Programming & Geeky Stuff", "Politics & India & Philosophy", and "Personal Stuff & Random Thoughts"(2).

I think this is a superior approach than the facebook/twitter/blog rss because when my readers will receive an email they do not like, they will see a link at the bottom of the mail which lets them remove themseves from the group that mail belonged to.

My friends who have added have added themselves in distinct sets of groups. Which probably already indicates that for the groups they did not add themselves to, my posts related to that topic was SPAM for them. Apologies and welcome to my mailing list :-)

Notes:

1. There is a use case of discovery, if I follow you because you wrote something on topic A, and your next post is on topic B that is new to me, it may not be spam and I might get interested in it. But once you give topic B a shot, you realize it is not for you, if you continue to receive posts about it from a person, it is spam.

2. I thought of being more fine grained, but this is a tradeoff, and further I feel within the group, there is a good amount of discovery potential, I do want my java readers to see my django is awesome posts so that they may switch.