Dear social network designers. Instead of automatic friend feeding, do this...

I really like the idea of cross-posting my tweets onto Google Buzz or Facebook, but I don't want those processes to be automatic. I feel that nine times out of ten, social network interface designers set up automatic feeding between services, when really, I believe users want one-off feeding.

Here's an example where it's done right. I use Gowalla (which is like Foursquare but popular in Austin), and every time you check in, it lets you tick a box whether you want that check-in to go to Facebook or Twitter. Most of the time I don't, but there's those few places that are so tweet-worthy that I just tick off the box. This is convenient because I don't have to go to my settings, turn on feeding, check in, and then turn off feeding again.

Here's an example where it's done poorly. I have a friend who uses Buzz but won't get on Google Reader. This should be fine since you can automatically feed your Shared Items on Reader onto Buzz. I was doing this initially, but then I realized that my Buzz audience was different than my Reader audience, and I wanted to share like five things in one day, but didn't want to spam my buzzards. And so I disconnected the auto-feeding. But then every now and then I see something on Reader that I'd really love to auto-post to Buzz, especially so my friend can see it, but I can't bring myself to go through the copy-paste routine.

I think this is common. Everybody is now active on multiple social networks, but their friends aren't active on the exact same ones, and so there is an untapped potential for sharing across networks. I think I would be five times more active on facebook if I could just cross-post 10% of my tweets there.

All it takes is a slight tweak to how you design friend feeding to make it go from being something that people try-then-abandon to something that reliably connects people.