Despite what some people might think, I'm not writing journal entries on Facebook. No, these are blog posts from my one, true web presence: www.ntldr.net (www.ntldr.com…ntldr.net…ntldr.com…whatever, they're all just host headers for a single IIS 7.5 site).
See, there's this nice little part of the web called RSS. It lets content be automatically published in a nifty machine-readable way. I even wrote about it years ago… Anyway, its relevance here is that there's a RSS feed published by www.ntldr.net that some other sites (such as Windows Live Profiles, and notably Facebook) are subscribed to. These two other sites are able to pick up a change I make to the site (add/change/delete blog posts) and inform their users. So everyone stays up to date and everything is happy-fun-unicorn-prancing-in-the-sun times.
Note that I called out 2 sites there. Never wrote anything about the Windows Live addition of syndication. Now, some might say that's because I don't have any Windows Live Network members (fine, I'll say what everyone is thinking "he doesn't have any Friends"), to which I'd reply "ha! But who's got the traffic analysis to show otherwise!". (note that this argument applies to Windows Live Friends; I don't have nearly the resources (or wherewithal!) to stalk everyone in real life…and no, I'm not looking for grants from Homeland Security to change that…) In truth, I just don't have a problem with the way Windows Live implemented the feature. But I do have a few issues & comments regarding how Facebook does it.
One issue is feed refresh speed. I made a post midafternoon Sunday. I log into Facebook to catch up on friends*, go to my profile for some reason (or maybe just look at the Facebook Feeds), and notice that it hasn't picked up the post made hours earlier. Now, this isn't really that big of a problem. I mean, how often do I really make posts? How critical is it that people get these & read it that second? It's not like I'm giving out stock tips or something here.
But Facebook has this weird insistence that the timestamps of the "journal" entries be different from the timestamps on the posted content. So in combination with slow refreshes of the feed, it's possible to get into situations where multiple posts are made, Facebook picks them all up at once, and then totally screws up the order of the posts. So much for being able to carefully lead readers through a series of posts! Just think how much fun it would be to read a mystery novel where the final chapter shows up before the mystery is even presented!** Even more annoying is that the order seems to depend on what view is presented. This happened to me later Sunday evening, after everything finally refreshed, with friends viewing the "oh noes! I goofed up!" post before reading the much more recent "praise of Hyper-V" post that reflected a much better personal mood.
Going in a slightly different direction, Facebook proxies every request to the host website from its users through itself. I can't really take issue with this behavior, because I think the original intent is to protect users from malicious content. Facebook pulls the entire feed content down and presents it as a user journal entry. So if I wanted to be malicious and put things like Web bugs, or perhaps a little bit of script to go do evil, nefarious acts, that trash could gain legitimacy and bypass restrictions because it's now on Facebook's site. Proxying also allows for another level of caching to occur (I suspect I may be seeing this behavior in my servers logs), thus improving performance and maybe letting the source site stay up if something becomes really, really popular (obviously good). However, as a site admin, I get kind of nervous about the blatant way this seems to be occurring, and the lack of control I seem to have over it. Plus, it wouldn't really be necessary if the design were tweaked a bit to not trick users into thinking everything was Facebook & originated on Facebook & that Facebook is the Real Internet.***
Tied to the content proxying is content reformatting. RSS feeds are XML; entries can contain XHTML and all its glorious formatting. As part of "journal-ifying", the original site's CSS and formatting are ignored, and the Facebook styles get applied. In most cases, this is fine, and works well to create a more seamless experience. But on a couple of my entries, the formatting has reacted strangely and the resulting Frankenstein looks horrible. Again, I much prefer the Windows Live route where users get just a headline & a brief snippet to catch their interest. Unfortunately, I doubt that model will ever be picked up by Facebook. They're too focused on keeping people on the site and making money off those people, even if they are misrepresenting the origins of the content that those people are coming to see. Now, I don't really have a problem with a company making money. I just don't like seeing ads next to things I've written. I don't run ads on www.ntldr.net, and I don't plan on ever doing so.
Umm…so…"boo! to these Facebook journal entries!" visit www.ntldr.net! ;-D (I'll conveniently ignore how many, many more people (and better targeted! these people might actually care about this stuff!) have probably read these posts now via Facebook than have ever visited my actual site…)
* this part's hypothetical; despite having an account there since the beginning of 2004, I'm still not really sure why people use Facebook
** not that I'm planning on featuring detective stories at any point, but it'd be nice to have the flexibility for me to make that choice
*** some exaggeration added for dramatic effect…please don't "eliminate" me if I've stumbled across the super-secret plans for world domination!
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