Beta FriendFeed to the Rescue?

I've been fighting an ongoing battle with myself. I love talking politics, and I like stirring the pot with controversy.

You might have noticed this week that I've been a bit more grumpy and irritable than usual. It's because of junk like this:

It takes no brains to bring this sort of stuff up. Allen's comment is akin to "you forgot to put the apostrophe after the s, rather than before, in the second sentence of the third paragraph." It's arguing for the sake of arguing. If there's a good factual debate, or even a decent informed difference of opinion, I'm all about it.

When it's this sort of thing, it's annoying, particularly when it's the first comment. It ends up leading to stuff like that last comment, because it sets a negative and destructive tone.

The irony is that this was a fluff piece about VP candidate Palin's Chuck Norris jokes, a brand new meme on FriendFeed and Twitter. It's a particularly stupid question from Allen, because I had him on a panel with me in Washington DC earlier this year where I introduced myself to the room as the political editorialist for Mashable. It isn't like he doesn't know what's going on.

I've been a huge advocate of FriendFeed since it launched. Very quickly after starting to use it, it became my home page. Most of the Rat Pack hung out on there, and it was a great way to keep track of what we were all up to and have a sort of communcal chat room. One by one, though, most of them have either become significantly less active, or withdrawn completely.

Of course, now that FriendFeed is no longer private beta, alpha, or whatever it was at the time, there's a lot more people on there. As Veronica Belmont noted this evening, a lot of the conversations have been devolving into slug fests lately. Not fact based or informed opinion debates. Out and out in your face, this is who I am and I don't care if it offends you slugfests.

It's annoying as crap.

At any rate, I've tried one last ditch thing to save the FriendFeed experience for me. Within the new Beta, there's an option to set up lists of folks that you can theoretically categorize those you're following.

Here's my brand new arrangement:

Except for a few known troublemakers, I'm extending the benefit of the doubt to everyone and starting them out in the "Non-Irksome" list. I'll give it a week, and start rapidly paring down folks and throwing them over to the "Irksome" list as needed.

It isn't really personal, but I just need to cut down on the level of irritation being injected to my info-stream. I'm not particularly a fan of anyone in this presidential race, but that doesn't mean I don't have an ideology, beliefs and sensitivities. In the course of the general level of Obama zealotry going on in the tech community right now, abandonment of reason, tact and fact is at all time highs.

At any rate, I don't want to get into the nuance of that, or I'd just bellyache and complain for a few screenfuls. Bottom line, I don't want to end up hating everyone from my industry, so I'm going to try to segregate myself from their joyous worship of Obama for the duration.

Hopefully this works. I'd hate to block FriendFeed for three months, but given the amount of armchair punditry going on surrounding this election cycle, there might not be another option.

I'll try to let you know next week how it goes.