With 2008 seemingly being the year of constant communication via things like Twitter and the aggregation of all you information feeds via aggregators like FriendFeed we are constantly being assaulted by more and more verbose crap. People who we may have considered to be valuable resources of current information turn out to be more irritation than of interest.

Sure I might be a cranky old fart with a low irritation threshold but there has to be a break even point where regardless how influential the person is you are following they just aren’t worth the hassle. Even with the hassle of dealing with the noise and irritation we find ourselves loath to unhook from these feeds because there is always the chance of reading something really useful.

One of the things one has to consider when jumping on the friending bandwagon that is so popular is what is your ROI of friending anyone; and don’t doubt that there isn’t an investment involved when you friend someone. It might only be your time but in this day and age that maybe the most valuable investment you make in anything. So what are you getting in return for this valuable investment? Is it worth all the noise and irritation that comes with following people like Robert Scoble or Dave Winer; or reading blogs of people like Marc Canter and some of the other so-called movers and shakers of the tech world.

Robert makes no apology for joining every new shiny thing that comes along and in the process bringing thousands of people with him on the Scoble Effect Train. We have seen this on Twitter, Facebook and now on FriendFeed. But as Robert prodigiously produces content on all these networks we find ourselves being pulled into a Scoble echo chamber of repetitive postings. After all how many times to we need to see that he is streaming live on Qik and that we should join him for a chat.

On top of this if we aren’t seeing what his saying first hand we get it second or third hand from people who are following him and that we are in turn following as well. At what point does all this redundancy make the whole exercise useless and make any ROI of your time pointless.

One of the good things to come out of this idea of friending is that we are able to easily take part in a larger circle of conversation. As good as this might be there is an inherent weakness in the system and it becomes no more apparent that when you look at the following to followers ratio of people like Dave Winer who see nothing wrong with basically having one sided conversations.

I don’t know about you but conversations are a two way process where the person you are talking to is willing to listen to you and talk with you - that is what makes it a conversation. With Dave though he makes it quite obvious that he is willing to let you hear him pontificate; because that is all a one way conversation is, but he doesn’t give a shit what you have to say. This even carried to the point where he thinks that anyone who criticizes him is only worthy of being banned.

Where is your ROI on your time invested in following people like Dave when they obviously don’t care about what you have to say unless you are a member of their like minded circle.

Granted I am a firm believe of listening to and talking with people who might have opposing viewpoints from myself. I also think that if you don’t partake in conversation with people like that then you are missing out on a larger conversation beyond your own echo chamber. That said though I equally feel that there is a point when these opposing viewpoints can become a drain on your time as you find yourself wasting that precious commodity battling against those argumentative viewpoints.

When you have people we are suppose to respect for their knowledge and abilities spend more time promoting their own forms of negativism and argumentative tirades you have to think it is time to get off of that train. After all where is the value to any conversation when someone like Dave throws out the Jew card whenever someone says something that he doesn’t like

As a Jew I find this waving of one’s race disingenuous and personally I find it disgusting that any discussion denigrates to this level. Then you have someone like Marc Canter who is supposedly a very intelligent man who has contributed a lot to technology but thinks that personal attacks add value to a conversation. In a post today while taking the expected shots at Microsoft he figured we would be endeared by his comments about Guy Kawasaki

This year’s faux paix has to do with asking Guy Kawasaki to keynote with Steve Ballmer (which is bad enough) but to add insult to injury they’ve asked Guy to chair the panel I’m on - about social networking. Now those of you who know Guy - know him to be the epitome of a blow hard marketing wonk, unable to back up anything he says with anything more than “say it in 3 words”. Brilliant.

Now I’m not that pissed off about this - as I figure I’ll just answer all of Guy’s questions in 3 words, that’s simple. But they’ve loaded up the panel with 6 people, and including Guy - that makes 7 people doing a panel. In other words - I don’t even really need to show up - it’ll be a complete waste of time. Lets see 7 people, divided by :45-:50 minutes, that comes out to….. well you do the math.

The only thing this tirade succeeded in doing is solidifying the growing feeling I had been nurturing the past couple of days and resulted in this post.

An important thing to remember through all this is that your time is one of the most valuable commodities you have. We also have to realize that anything we invest our time in has to bring us back something of value for that investment. There comes a point I think were we have to step back an realistically evaluate whether investing any more time in listening to people who aren’t willing to listen back or are just using you and your time as a way to keep themselves on top by saying nasty or pointless things.

There comes a point when we have to be willing to get off the train and start re-investing our time in people who are willing to have a conversation. I’ve reached that time - how about you?

Similar Posts:

• Don’t Guilt Me Into Being A Friend
• The Hunt For Nonexistent Experts on Social Networks
• FriendFeed Is Growing Nicely Regardless Of What Scoble Says
• So You Want To Be A Rich And Famous Blogger Eh
• We Need To Break The Circle Jerk That Social Media Is Becoming