Facebook have updated their site design again, in what many say is an attempt to counter the growing popularity of twitter. I’m in two minds about the update. On the one hand it’s facebook’s site and theirs to do what they want with. If I want control of content, delivery and style then that’s what this blog is for (and long term readers can attest to the issues in that model). Alternatively, though, I now look like the most spamming user in the world. This is because I feed facebook from a number of sources, so all my status updates are just shipped in from twitter, links come from my delicious bookmarks and google reader shared items, images are all uploaded to flickr with a notification to facebook and my likes on youtube and last.fm are moved over as well. Also, of course my blog comes through from it’s RSS feed.

And I can see that to a point that works rather well, I have no desire to use Facebook to do all my activity on, as I’m already happily using those sites to perform the functions they’re good at. However, I also gain because by linking back to facebook I can still update my friends on what I’m doing.

Until recently these updates were much less prominent, in large part because facebook was in the habit of only showing the latest status updates or activity of each person in the news feed. Now, however, it seems happy to show multiple events from a single user on the main page, and also to show updates from a feed instantly.

This makes a user like me who feeds in a lot of content swamp their friends news feeds. I don’t like the idea of that so I hope facebook either introduce options for throttling your own activity updates back a bit. Alternatively you can hide me, but then you get nothing, which seems to defeat the point rather.