Digital Duplication

I have become aware over the last few days that I have a lot of digital duplication going on.

I use Outlook 2007 to read my RSS feeds and I use a little Twitter application called OutTwit to corral together my friends Tweets from Twitter.

and

and

The duplication is coming from reading a websites RSS feeds and then also adding their Twitter feed – 99% of the time the two are exact duplicates of each other.

There are also may websites that are simply using the popularity of Twitter to draw more people into reading their website by using an app called Twitter Feed.  This takes an RSS feed and sends tweets to Twitter each time the RSS feed updates with a new item.

So as you can see – if you read a sites RSS feed and happen to follow their tweets then your going to be seeing double!

Now I am not saying this is a major problem and it is easy enough to solve – which I finally did the other day.  I compared my RSS feeds to my Twitter friends and removed the RSS feed from my Outlook. 

So why remove the RSS feed and not the Twitter account?  Easy – they are more likely to tweet an isolated comment in and between the stories on their RSS feed instead of post a story for their 140 character comment on their site and subsequently to their RSS feed and then subsequently again to their Twitter trail.

This happened to me once before as well – back during my transition from email based newsletters to RSS feeds.  I wonder what the next transition point will be and what technologies will be crossing paths with each other?

So, how do you deal with digital duplication?

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Richard Hay  (3359 Posts)

Richard is the Owner of WindowsObserver.com and has been involved in tech for over 25 years. His first website – AnotherWin95.com – came online in 1995. Back then he used GeoCities Web Hosting for it and what you see here today is the result of the work he has continued on the site since 1995. In January 2010 his community contributions were recognized by Microsoft when he was awarded the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Windows Desktop Experience. In January 2011 he was renewed as a Microsoft MVP but in a new category called Windows Expert - Consumer and in January 2012 he received the award for the third time.