A funny thing happened on FriendFeed today. Well, actually it wasn't funny at all. To me it was particularly lame, to others it was simply annoying. A boy cried wolf.

One user decided he was going to make up a big rumor out of the blue and try to spread it using FriendFeed. The annoying thing is that it somewhat worked.

Some of us who deal with rumors for a living quickly dismissed it as having no basis, but the problem is that quite a few other people started to run with it. Just look at how many comments it got. Even if users didn't believe it, many took the time to comment. Some even took the time to look into it.

Finally, the user admitted that he made the whole thing up and used the excuse that many new media douchebags use: it was a "social media experiment" and he promised not to do it again. As Mike Arrington replied in a comment: "don't worry, you spent your credibility capital, doesn't matter if you do it again."

Here's the problem. Services such as FriendFeed and Twitter are powerful crowd-sourcing tools that can be very handy in terms of getting to the bottom of rumors. We saw that a bit today with the Twitter/Summize situation. However, when people intentionally abuse this system, it damages it for everyone else going forward - no matter their intent.

The moral is: Don't be a d-bag. With great power comes great responsibility.

You can find me on FriendFeed here.