Twitterleak distracts from other social networking platforms

I get it in Facebook, but I know Twitterleak has probably made incursions elsewhere, too. The microblogging platform is open-source, which makes it eminently easy to duplicate postings elsewhere. In itself, that's a convenient and efficient use of time. Where it fails, though, is when Twitterspeak is used in those posts.

To each social network its own audience
Facebook positioned itself early on as being for an older crowd than MySpace (grownups rather than kids), and I think it continues to project a certain level of maturity with its simple white-and-blue layout and lack of really sleazy content. MySpace was a natural repository for blog posts written in 133t or chatspeak, but Facebook has always tended towards fully-written sentences that use real language. MySpace started out as a place to promote music, but Facebook pages helped the service find a niche in promoting all manner of professional services - which helped shape its audience and the language used to reach them.

Twitter is an amalgam, because the 140 character limit challenges people to get to the point quickly, but businesses use Twitter in ways they never used instant messaging. This can be done by learning to write more efficiently, or by using abbreviations. Both the commands and conventions in Twitter automatically add a level of jargon to the feed; people refer to me as @TPWard so I can know who tweets about me, and posts are frequently organized with #hashtags. It's easy to mix chatspeak in with that, and although I try to avoid it myself I understand it's what I'm going to be reading when I use that service.

When Twitter leaks
So the problem of Twitterleak results from Twitter-focused posts showing up on other services. It may be hard to imagine, but millions of Facebook users are barely able to understand how that site functions, and when they read status updates that r rly short #updates which RT @everyone they dont lol, they scratch their heads. Why? Because twitter updates are reaching the wrong audience.

Ways to prevent Twitterleak

1. Learn to post concisely on Twitter so any mirrored posts are in English (or whatever language your audience expects to communicate in, be it Swahili, Cantonese, Southern Drawl, chatspeak, Engineer, or binary).
2. Consider your Twitter habits, and how they relate to your contacts on other sites. Don't indiscriminately cross-post if your posts aren't in the best language for both sites.
3. Facebook has a selective Twitter update application that only posts tweets that include the hashtag #fb. Use it to weed out the @replies, #hashtags, and 133t tweets.
4. It might be pointless to cross-post at all if your contacts have more than a 50% overlap - your message might become more distraction than information.