I admit it: I'm not as quick on the draw as at least a few of my friends and co-workers think I am. The immediately relevant case in point is that fact that I'm having a bear of a time learning how to navigate the NetworkedBlogs application on Facebook. Facebook is itself easy enough to figure out. The NetworkedBlogs app is actually kind of nifty, and the preliminary work of registering this blog on it was simplicity itself. The vetting process--where they demand 10 friends' confirmations as you (me) as the author, and a minimum 'fan' base of 20 to enter the feed in cascading posts--while less than efficient (I'll explain why shortly) at least makes sense.
The real problem is getting the RSS feeds to transfer from Feedburner.com (which I use) to Facebook. I managed a few manual posts and link, no problem. But when I checked the staus of the RS Blog on Networked Blogs, I saw error messages in the feed status area. Which is a fancy was of saying that Facebook didn't recognize what Feedburner was sending it. I don't know why this is--I hope it's a simple matter of me giving it the wrong URL. (I've just fixed it, so if that was the problem, it'll be corrected shortly. I hope.)
The efficiency matter I just mentioned is more of a pet peeve than a real design flaw. On Facebook, you have the ability to launch applications more or less at will, and a lot of these are geared toward signing your friends up for wacky good and services, like joining a game of Knighthood, or getting a digital Mushroom, or starting a digital garden, or whatever. If you have more than a few friends on this thing (I managed to gather 54 in the past month, don't ask how) these gifts, requests and such like are going to back up. Facebook has, to its credit, anticipated this, and segregated the older requests-in-waiting from the newer ones. But they don't seem to have anticipated the probability that faced with, say, 6,452,744 outstanding requests, most people will just ignore that darned button and after a few minutes, not even think about it. (My wife who is a case in point, had over 100 of these requests gathering dust and it never occurred to her to clear them out.)
My point is merely this: Facebook is not quite the untapped wellspring of fame and prosperity I'd been led to believe "social networking" sites are. At the very least, using them effectively takes skills that I don't have (yet). Obviously, this is not to say that there's no value to Facebook-based applications (if a creep like Michelle Malkin can get 300+ freaks and weirdos to read her stuff there's every chance I can get a bunch to read mine.) I think it is to say that there's clearly a learning curve involved in dealing with this type of tech and the hype there, like everywhere else, needs to be cut through first before one can become productive using it.
On the positive side, the RSS feed to this blog is available on Livejournal.com--that took two minutes to set up--but the lack of formatting in the text is something I'm not that happy with. Still, it's there. And if you're on Facebook and want to subscribe to the feed there, you can do that here. Heck, become a fan and/or confirm I own this silly place. (I'd be grateful.) I'm dealing easily enough with LinkedIn and I don't know enough people on MySpace to create a profile there, but . . . we'll see.
Next, I try to install Google Analytics . . .
Recent Comments