I I’ve been playing with twitter for a long time, and I’ve recently also created a friendfeed account. These are fun tools to keep in touch with my techie friends and to discuss how often twitter goes down.

Now, I had the idea a few days ago, that given that friendfeed is an aggregator of my online content (and there’s a lot – not as much as some but a lot nonetheless) was it be possible to create a feedback loop?

So how do you go about doing that?

A feedback loop is very simple.  Something that gets posted to the in one place gets reposted by an application reading that feed back to the same place. An infinite loop.

So, to test this theory I setup 3 things:

  1. A twitter account for extremefeedback
  2. A friendfeed account for extremefeedback
  3. A Twitterfeed account

I setup the friendfeed account to read from the twitter account. I setup the twitterfeed account to blog the RSS feed from friendfeed. So a post on twitter should be read by friendfeed, and then posted back to twitter via twitterfeed.

I then posted 1 tweet to twitter… and since then, that tweet has been retweeted from friendfeed by twitterfeed. I have created a feedback loop! It’s only on a 30 minute timescale (that’s what twitterfeed will do) but it still works.

Why is this important?

Basically, it was very easy, and because it was very easy, this could be a problem given that there will be a proliferation of aggregators in the not too distant future.  The reason being that a single post is consumed without any thought to the ID of the post – in other words, what is the original post and how do we know?  This means that a feed cannot currently (or chooses not to) recognise the same post being reposted.

As there will be a proliferation of aggregators, there will be a growing problem with reposting of the same content across the internet.  Assuming that somewhere someone will make an RSS to twitter (or friendfeed etc) that is quicker than 30 minutes, it’s entirely possible to see a situation where internet posts fill the internet and cause either a meltdown or at the very least a proliferation of pointless content.  Aggregators and microblogging applications beware!

It’ll be the blog equivalent of spam!  Maybe it should be called Aggregation Feedback

I think we need to revisit how programmers for things such as friendfeed are going to consume content from other sites.  Without it, we could be in trouble on the net!