The social web is always changing. Platforms such as Friendster and MySpace rise and fall, and others like Facebook, Twitter and now Buzz take their places. As social networking sites become more and more intrinsic to the way we consume media and interact with our peers and customers, it can be tempting to just pick one platform and stick with it. That’s fine for personal use. If you use social sites only for talking and sharing with your friends, it’s your prerogative to choose the one that works best for you.

Businesses don’t have this option. Any brand that wants to engage customers on social media must meet them where they are. There’s not a business in the world whose customer base uses, say, Twitter exclusively. You’ve gotta fire up that Facebook fan page as well. YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Buzz — each has its own community and set of laws.

As companies navigate these tricky social waters, many are daunted by the task of managing their profiles across all networks. This is especially challenging for creators of content, such as news outlets and blogs — sites that are posting fresh items multiple times a day.

The solution many content producers have chosen is to connect the RSS feeds of their blogs to Twitter through a service like TwitterFeed, which grabs the headline of your blog entry, creates a bit.ly link and pushes it on through. Major social media blogs Mashable and TechCrunch do this. Some big traditional publications, including Vanity Fair and Esquire, are doing a combination of seeding out headlines and also creating Twitter-tailored messages, complete with hashtags and @replies.

Presumably, these bigger pubs have the budget to hire full-time social media managers. And for the smaller guys, most of their readers and followers understand that it’s just not possible to hand-deliver everything. They’ll consume the content, regardless of the method of conveyance.

But there’s a debate right now over whether companies big or small, publications and even individuals should link their blogs to automatic feeds and their social accounts to each other.

No doubt many CMOs at content-creating companies would love nothing more than a magic button that would update all their company’s social networks at once. And with the ability to link Facebook to Twitter and vice versa through API devices, plus the aforementioned RSS linkups, that’s a possibility.

And guess what? It’s lame.

I learned this myself the hard way. I stand before you guilty of having experimented with linking various social networks together. Like a business and its customers, not all of my friends are on the same network. And I use to feel that I didn’t have time to cater to both. Most recently, I had my Twitter feeding to my Buzz for a couple of weeks. Guess what it got me.

Unfollowed.

Yes, it is important to get your message out through as many channels as possible. And cutting through the noise is a challenge. But whether you’re a corporation or just a dude or chick who likes to tweet, linking your channels together dilutes the message and annoys people.

Tim Maly knows this. The blogger behind the future-thinking Quiet Babylon has created a manifesto to fight the problem. (Via FastCompany.)

His Tumblr blog Unlink Your Feeds offers multiple arguments for hand-delivering messages tailored for your followers on different networks. Start with this post, which explains why automatic feeds are hurting you, your friends and the Internet.

It sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s actually pretty serious stuff. Given how much time we spend on social networks, consuming messages, it’s important to practice some stewardship when it comes to message creation. Don’t fill the world or your followers’ heads with noise.

Plus, it’s just good business.

What do you think? Have you experimented with linking together feeds? How’d that work out for you?