[GDNA] Twitter/Tumblr Update + Browsing Preferences

I'm not keen on this, at all.  I can already see that the gDNA Twitter feed is affecting my browsing experience in a negative way.  When I log on to my PC, TweetDeck tells me that so-and-so did such-and-such on the site, and as part of my morning routine, I'm simultaneously loading several tabs in a browser (one of which is my gDNA Home page) - so I end up getting two updates for the same thing.  The end result, I imagine, is that people are going to come to the site less because they're getting so many updates about specific things on the site from other networking applications that general browsing becomes mostly a pointless exercise in repetition, and they're thus going to miss a lot of new content that's not on their watchlist.

Imagine how irritating it's going to be when you get multiple updates on all of your networks for all of your friends.  Even if it's only "once an hour" - dude, c'mon.  That's probably an average of five updates a day, for each friend?  Multiply that by however many friends you HAVE, and I suspect some people are either going to remove friends from one or more networks in order to cut down on the redundant alerts, or stop using gDNA.

Some people might like getting pinged from five different applications every hour, but I sure as hell wouldn't, and I imagine I'm not the only one.  Most of the people I talk to on a regular basis hate Facebook, MySpace, etc. in great part because of the excessive amount of (mis)information that's posted everywhere - it's essentially spam of useless crap we'd rather not see, but there's no way to impose our own filters on it.  We're forced to absorb it all whilst hunting down the morsels of information that we're actually interested in, and it very quickly becomes both tedious and frustrating.

Example.  As a PC gamer, I have pretty much zero interest in what my gDNA friends did on their Xboxes yesterday, or the day before, or for the entire last two weeks.  Whenever gDNA incorporates Steam and Xfire, I'm not going to want to see those activity logs either.  And the reason is that I'm not interested in what people are doing - I'm interested in what they are thinking.  I'm sure I'm not alone in this "give me useful information or give me a kick in the face" subset of the gDNA userbase, and if possible I would prefer never to see the activity updates - on my own page or on other people's.  But gDNA doesn't seem to have a way to turn those off.

I noticed that there's an option somewhere (either in the gDNA panel or the profile settings page, I forget which) to set which type of feed you want visitors to your page to see by default (i.e. All Experiences, Stories, or Game Feed).  I've set mine to be Stories, as I'll never have a Game Feed until I start using Xfire (and even then I'd still rather people see my stories), but I wish there was also (or instead) an option to set which feed you see on OTHER people's pages by default.  The concept of browsing preferences is not new, and it's extremely popular for a reason.

When I go to a new person's profile page, I don't want to see what game they've played in the last hour - I want to see if they've written any gaming experiences, because those matter 1000x more to me than Xbox activity.  There will always be a number of people interested in playing activity, so the current site layout is great for them - but giving those people exclusive priority over the ones who couldn't give a flying fruitcake is, I think, a mistake.

A social networking site that wants to satisfy its users is constantly treading the line between versatility and annoyance, balancing out features that people want with information overload.  In this particular instance I'm of the opinion that we're dipping into the latter, and either they need to introduce options to limit these new features (for those who'd rather not deal with them) or take them out altogether.

I didn't want to post up a comment on that blog about it, because I appreciate that the website staff are just trying to make this place more interesting for us - but I hope they don't forget that some people prefer a much more streamlined, non-redundant experience, and that is a big part of why we were interested in gDNA to begin with.  We came here, it was slick and useful, without too many extra fiddly bits, and we liked it for its relative simplicity.  The more things that are added, the less simple this site is going to get - and, accordingly, the less interested we will be in using it.

And it would be a shame to leave, because I quite like it here.