Who said Barack Obama was my friend?

So after seeing my coworker's massively stocked RSS reader, I decided to give the updated Google Reader a try. It's much better than their first prototype, which was trying so desperately to be AJAXy it was underwhelming and painful. But that was two years ago, and what with Web 2.0 and "feeds" being all the rage, I decided it'd be a great way to condense all the mindless clicking to check on people's blogs into one place. The beautiful thing about Reader is that you can just scan through dozens of posts (if they're short) with your scroll wheel in no time.

The sucky thing is that I've discovered that for every truly awesome story on Digg's front page, there's a whole bunch of useless Apple fanboy posts or choice articles about things like the pee shiver, some geek with a Firefox ATM card, and misleadingly labeled rant about why there are 2 pi in a circle. Since adding digg's feed to my Reader, I haven't yet been able to get below 100 unread articles. Like some demon Whac-a-Mole, it keeps sprouting stories I don't care about, burying the "important" feeds.

I discovered a bunch of my friends are now syndicating their blogs as Facebook notes, which is pretty convenient. I can just grab the master feed of friends' notes and add it to my Google Reader. Done. Since I don't try not to visit Facebook every day, it's a nice way to keep on top of their blogs. Each person posts, on average, once a day. Very easy.

Then I decided, in a fit of optimistic democratic engagement, to "support" Barack Obama on Facebook. Like many candidates, his campaign manager posted a profile there showing his softer side (how many people can claim a musical palate ranging from Bach to Miles Davis to the Fugees?). The idea is people can express their support for a candidate, which shows up in their friends' Facebook stalker feeds (which are not, incidentally, available as RSS), which encourages other people to support him/her, and it spreads like a virus. Which is all well and good for Obama--he's managed to almost beat Hillary at fundraising by getting a stunning 100,000 individual donors.

The problem, though, is Facebook decided he was my friend. And as such, I now get "his" notes all over my friends feed. At least twice a day now. They're not even interesting notes either--I know he's not really logging into Facebook and posting them, it's syndicated from some blog maintained by one of his campaign managers.

I like this guy. I want him to be President. Barring any dramatic revelations 'tween now and the primary he's got my vote. But I don't want to hear about the 35-year-old legal assistant from Houston, Texas who decided to vote for Obama. I don't care.

RSS could be the next frontier for spam. Just wait.