Friday, October 28, 2011

Facebook Doublespeak

You just gotta love those guys who run Facebook. They had a really nice feature where you could have your blog posts (like this one) automatically import into your Facebook page. It was especially good for people like me, who aren't about to write entries for the blog, and then go write another for Facebook. It was buggy—I had to keep goosing the thing to make it do the imports—but it was way better than the alternative.

No more. I was checking last night on why my latest posts hadn't appeared on my Facebook page, and I couldn't even find the place on Facebook where you set that. So I searched Help. Lo and behold, I discovered this little buried nugget:

"Importing a blog or RSS feed to your personal Facebook account is no longer available."
A little more digging yielded this (boldface mine):
"We want you to connect with your fans in the most effective ways possible. That's why as of September 30th you'll no longer be able to automatically import posts from your website to your Page notes. The best way to get people to interact with your content is to give them insight into the links you share on your Wall by adding personal comments and responding to feedback from fans. We're focused on creating even better tools for Pages. Look for announcements soon."
The service is free, so I suppose I shouldn't complain too much. But honestly, what a load of crap. Have I mentioned my suspicion that Facebook is the spawn of the devil? I think the realspeak translation is: "We never could get it to work right, and our software guys begged us to let them do something else."

I'll be trying one of those network share thingies.  But they ask for everything but the combination to your hall locker. If I disappear suddenly, you'll know why.

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3 Comments:

At 4:12 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wordpress makes it very easy to share posts with other platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Are you sure Blogger doesn't offer something similar?

 
At 4:15 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I like having your posts show up on facebook, but if it doesn't work out for you, I know how to find you here! - Marco

 
At 4:19 PM, Blogger Jeffrey A. Carver said...

They've got all kinds of feed options that I've opted into. Most of them I don't know what the hell they do, but they don't get things onto FB. However, Networked Blogs seems to be doing the trick now. (That is, this post appeared instantly on my FB page.) If it keeps working, that's good enough for me.

That's assuming FB doesn't decide to shut that down, too. Here's hoping they don't.

 

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