Review of Facebook RSS applications

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I’ve been an RSS “evangelist” for a couple of years now (www.bbvx.org/wp goes back to June 2005) — expecting that IE 7’s support for RSS would make it more and more important for all websites to produce RSS feeds for their content. Well, the sea change in user behavior hasn’t happened yet — and I’m still encountering folks who give me a blank stare when I say RSS, though there have been articles in the popular press and videos like “RSS in plain English” from www.commoncraft.com are helping to get the word out. There are, of course, more web sites producing RSS feeds (including www.aauw.org/rss/news.xml, yay!), but the info-sharing hasn’t yet “taken over the world”.

I took my bias towards RSS to Facebook. Even if information on Facebook can’t be posted outside its “walled garden,” it would seem useful to pull some of that syndicated information from the outside world into Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I include information from this blog https://change.bbvx.org. That’s a basic feature of the Facebook “notes” application. You can add the address of a single blog and the items you (presumably) post there will be pulled into your Facebook notes. [There are, I think, then two separate streams of comments — your blog’s and Facebook’s.]

I’m importing another blog to Facebook using the Wordbook application. This requires installing a plugin on a WordPress blog, then “connecting” that blog to the Facebook account. New posts on the blog show up in the account’s mini feed, news feed, etc.

I tried the MyRSS application for general purpose importing of feed data to my Facebook profile — but it didn’t seem to refresh automatically, and that is, of course, the whole point. It seemed designed more as an RSS reader than as a “reposting” application — but since I read my feeds outside of Facebook, it wasn’t what I was looking for.

I’m currently using the Feed Friend RSS application to import the AAUW and AAUW NC news feeds to my profile, It seems to be working fine. One quibble is that I’m actually importing the STEM subfeed of the AAUW NC blog — but there doesn’t seem to be a way to label the feed correctly.

There are, of course, major hangups here –

  1. There’s no way to put RSS feeds on a group’s page. [This is just one of many applications that would be good to make available to groups, but, to my mind, it’s the most critical.] While my friends (and others, I think) can “see” the feeds on my profile and as an “available feed” if they add the Feed Friend RSS application, being able to put the feed on the group page would require much less effort for the same number of eyeballs/headline. [See, e.g., myspace.com/aauw_organization with the embedded RSS feed from aauw.org.] It would seem that providing a functionality at least like the “import notes” that’s available to individuals would recognized as valuable by the Facebook powers.
  3. There’s only limited info from Facebook that’s available to an external RSS reader. Yes, I can see notifications (someone sent me a message, replied to a post, etc.), but there are lots of other changes that are invisible. It’s very hard to tell when, say, a new discussion has been started in one of the groups you’ve joined. Not all “changes” to a group bump the group up in your list of recently modified groups, so we’re back to having to click through a number of groups just to see if something’s changed — shades of the awful “Please check back often” on early web sites. There’s a Facebook group looking at this issue, but it’s not clear if they’re making progress.

So… Do you have other techniques, suggestions, or applications? If so, please post here (change.bbvx.org) or on my Facebook profile under Notes.

Field staff…

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There’s a movement afoot to replace the state/regional structure with “field workers” –

  • Field organizer — goes out into the field to help arrange events, recruit members, start new branches, bolster faltering branches, etc., etc.
  • Field coordinator — works out of a (home?) office to facilitate communication between the national organization and the grass roots

It’s clear that this has been discussed at the board level for about a year, and the August 2007 statement of the board’s priorities for implementation by 12/31/2007 includes:

  • Create a staff Field Coordinator position within the Membership Department to work with branches, identify and share best practices, etc.

Note, however, that the “field worker” position — from the membership/volunteers — is different from the staff position called for in this short term plan. From what I’ve heard, these are “quasi-staff” (e.g. some expenses reimbursed, but no salary or benefits). The prediction of our ability to recruit these folks is based somewhat on our success in recruiting folks to serve at the state and regional levels.

There’s a danger, I think, in holding the mental model that two people can accomplish what a dozen or more contribute to now in a successfully functioning state. Yes, of course, both of those roles are needed — but what’s the infrastructure look like to have them pull others in to get particular tasks accomplished? What’s the glue that holds that team together over the medium term — to take the lessons they learn from one project and pass it on to the next? to find the particular skills that individuals are willing to offer and  leverage those on more than one project.

I don’t want to get too Myers-Briggsy, while I honor the notion of field staff just “getting things done” (J), I’d hate to lose the capacity building/potential of the current “network-focused” structure (P).

So perhaps the OSG nugget that recommends the current “required” state/regional structure be pared back to “primary contact, communications contact, financial contact” could be morphed:

primary -> field organizer
communications -> field coordinator
finance -> ?? who *is* handling the local money in the field staff model? Do we need to care?

[It doesn’t look like those specifics made it into the final report — it just says updating what’s required and what’s optional in terms of offices.]

I’ve spent so much of my AAUW time focused on providing the infrastructure to allow the grass roots folks to find each other. I don’t see as much progress as I’d like from the national level to take over that role (though there is some, of course). My motivation for all this effort has come from  _Bowling_Alone_  — the importance of community groups in ensuring the health of communities in general.
So as this idea continues to be discussed, I do think we need to put some “network” around those “field workers” (and discuss how they link to resource pools at the national level) in order not to risk going down a Lone Ranger path.

Some of this may be obvious — but until it’s all hashed out and written up, I’m trying to capture thoughts here.

More Facebook seduction …

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I’ve written before about the “reboot” of e-mail: a completely clean “mailbox,” only a few manageable threads, not the hundreds of folders with thousands of messages collected over the years.

But I realized another seductive characteristic …

There’s only one “theme,” no hours of angst over typography and images.  Kinda comforting to be in a world where content is so important.

Moving from Yahoo! groups to Facebook

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Okay, I’ve been using Yahoo! groups (and their earlier incarnations) for several applications. I’ve also used other mailing lists (majordomo, and mailman) for 20 years or so, and none of my communities have used much other than the mailing list provided by Yahoo!. Here are a few notes I wrote up for one of the ones that’s exploring a migration from Web minus one to Facebook:

You can Google “facebook 101” and pick a tutorial or …

1. Go to facebook.com and register.

You need to give them a bit of info — including your birthday and an e-mail address.

Click the link they’ll send you in e-mail and login to the system.

You’ll be asked to set up your profile — listing schools and places you worked, but you can skip that.

You’ll also be asked to “find what friends are already on facebook” by allowing them to login to your webmail account or upload your mail address book. That seemed too invasive to me, so I skipped it.

2. Once past the initial setup, you’ll have a menu that’s pretty clean:

Across the top right: home | account | privacy | logout
Across the top left: Profile (edit) | Friends | Networks | Inbox
Down the left column: Groups, Events, Notes, Posted items, etc. — depending on what you’ve “installed” and configured.

Explore the “account” and “privacy” links and then go to the “edit” link next to “Profile”. I’ve allowed my “networks” to see my profile (privacy settings), but hid my birthday (edit profile).

The defaults are pretty much okay (except maybe for the birthday), if you’re not adding a lot of personal data about yourself.

Click “home” to see information on your facebook contacts. Click “profile” for what others will see about you.

3. Find others on facebook.
You can search (box in upper left) by name and then either send people you find a request to be friends, or just send them a message. [I contacted a niece and nephew, and we can “talk” to each other, but I didn’t ask to become their “friend”. Others, however, do choose to be “friends” with their kids or their kids’ friends.] The difference is whether you want to see their full profile and be notified of their “doings”. If you want that “close connection” with someone, make him/her your friend. But you can carry on a “conversation” with someone who’s not your friend..

4. Join a network – geographically or one based an a “alum.xxx.edu” or “mycompany.com” type e-mail address.

5. Search for groups to join

Use AAUW, NCCWSL, pay equity, etc. for likely candidates. From the “discussions” in the group, you’ll probably find others to befriend.

6. Keep up with your friends through your home page or their profiles

You may get most of your Facebook information through the group pages, but  on your home page (the one when you login or click the “home” link in the upper right) you’ll see notifications of what those in your network are doing (along with a few relatively unobtrusive “ads” that let Facebook keep the lights on).

You may also get e-mail notifications about what folks are doing/posting. If those seem redundant (i.e. you are checking Facebook “often enough” for your purposes), you can turn those off by going to Account (link in upper right) > Notification section and unchecking the things you don’t want to hear about in e-mail.  [There are some applications (e.g. Questions) that insist on sending e-mail that will have to be configured separately if you add them and start getting unwanted e-mail.]
To see what your friends are learning about you, go to your Profile (upper left) and look at your mini-feed. You can configure what’s posted there  (Privacy – upper left > News feed and mini-feed).

To get more detail on a particular friend, click their name or picture to get to their profile.