Facebook isn’t so good at the social side of things.
If you’ve ever done Facebook development or even customized your Facebook fan page, you will very likely have had moments where you wanted to cancel your Facebook account and give up.
For example, this morning I checked the Facebook fan page for Socialeers.com and I noticed that no new blog posts were imported since the day I set it up. So I went to the page, clicked to import my blog’s RSS feed and noticed that the previous feed that I saved was no longer there. No biggie, I’ll add it back.
So I paste my feed URL into the input box and…
Hmmm, that’s odd. It’s the same feed URL that I used when I set it up the first time. So I open the feed in a new tab and verify that it works. It does. So I try http://socialeers.com/feed which redirects to my feedburner feed and that doesn’t work either.
So I decide to search and see if anybody else is experiencing this and to see if I can find a fix. Not surprisingly, I’m not alone in this one.
This page on Facebook started 8 months ago and still doesn’t seem to have been resolved.
A common theme that pops up is the number of emails that people send to Facebook’s support which go unanswered. Having done some development to integrate with the platform, I have sent several unanswered emails regarding mysterious cases where features work one day and stop working the next or all together.
Just the other day, I was using the getLoginStatus functionality without a problem, then it simply stopped working and provided a message that the feature was temporarily disabled for my website. I checked the forums to find that Facebook had apparently disabled the feature for my application but would not have done so without first emailing me to tell me why. No email.
So it seems that the leader in social media could stand to brush up on their social skills. It’s obvious that if you want to integrate with Facebook, you’re at their mercy. It’s also obvious that they need to improve their brand a little bit.
If you’ve had any troubles with Facebook and want to share, add a comment. I’d love to hear what you have to say.
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Let's Socialize