Lately I’ve been growing a “pet hatred” towards applications that automatically post updates to Twitter or Facebook, specially those that do it often, I’m thinking in “I’m in [some place]” kind of posts of location-based services like Gowalla and Foursquare or the “Just listened to [some song]” updates of media players, just to name a few. The problem with these updates is that there’s no added value, nothing really relevant to share; while sometimes generated updates are useful, posting blog updates is the best example, in most cases a automated tool can’t add content, can’t share what’s so cool about that song or place, can’t share the context for that update. This often means a noisy timeline that people want to avoid and that’s why automated update services should be used sparingly, prefer sharing items explicitly and really sharing something rather that dumping stuff the timeline.