Quiet Declarations

Thanks to a recent Facebook change, the feature to import my blog posts as notes has gone from pretty useful to downright annoying — and if you’re reading this note via Facebook the text is going to get cut off before I can tell you why!

So Facebook came out with this cool feature a while back that automatically imports your blog posts as Facebook notes.  A title and 40-word summary would appear in my news feed under the heading “Chad imported a note” and, as I recall, you could click on the note to read the entire post and/or link through to the blog itself.  At some point, without telling anyone, they substantially changed the way this works.  It no longer tells you that the note was imported.  It also no longer displays the entire note on Facebook, forcing you to link through to the blog to continue reading, which isn’t terrible in and of itself… except that they also removed the link so you can’t access the blog from the note!

Fortunately, after some investigating I figured out that you can link through to the blog by visiting the notes tab.  However, this is highly counterintuitive since every other news feed item is designed so you can click directly on it to access what you want.  More importantly, if I show up in a friend’s news feed and they don’t know about the blog import feature, they would never think to look in the note tab, and as a result it just looks like I wrote two sentences and stopped like some kind of tease or moron or something.

And since it’s not possible to edit imported notes, I couldn’t make any Facebook-specific edits like inserting the link myself even if I wanted to.  To really make the note reader-friendly for Facebook users I would have to turn off the blog import feature altogether, copy and paste each blog post as a new note, and add all the relevant hyperlinks plus a permalink at the end… which I would never do because that’s cumbersome and error-prone, the very reasons why one would want a decent blog import feature in the first place!

This issue is indicative of what I believe is Facebook’s most annoying tendency — its unwavering quest to keep you in its world even when doing so comes at the expense of superior usability.  My blog software is superior to Facebook notes.  My email client is superior to Facebook messaging.  My photo software is superior to Facebook’s photo app.  There are a dozen services that would be superior to Facebook events if I were allowed to plug them into Facebook to access the network effect.  Facebook has a huge advantage in leveraging social networks, but it does not necessarily follow that they need to build a bunch of stuff that already exists in order to compete with Google… which, by the way, is precisely Zuckerburg’s strategy.

If all goes well, much of what people do on the Internet will be accomplished within Facebook. Instead of eBay, you can buy in Facebook’s marketplace. Instead of iTunes, there’s iLike. In other words, Zuckerberg wants to keep you—student, graduate or graybeard—logged on to Facebook, organizing virtually everything you do via the social graph.

There’s got to be a better way they can try to take over my existence “via the social graph” that doesn’t involve forcing me into using inferior services.  Opening up the ability to design applications was a huge step in the right direction.  I hope they take more steps in the right direction.  And in the meantime, I hope they fix their blog import tool.