Tag Archives: facebook

Status of my Facebook Applications

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Here’s a quick look at the Facebook applications I’ve tried on my profile, the ones I’ve kept and the ones I’ve disabled.

I removed links below the profile for Del.icio.us, Feed friend, and Where I’ve been.

Disabled

  • Word-A-Day, Zoho Online Office, – just didn’t use
  • Questions — would more likely use this on LinkedIn, not Facebook
  • Flashcards and FC Test – developer seems to be off on other things, and until there’s a search function it seems minimally useful

Remaining Applications

  • Facebook Basics
    • Friends
    • Groups
    • Ads and Pages
    • I am a Fan of (like groups for pages)
    • Mini-Feed
    • Information
    • Education
    • The Wall
  • Information I provide
    • Notes – miniblog items and imports of this information stream
    • Posted Items – links that I want to highlight
    • Flickr Badge – photos I post on Flickr rather than Facebook
    • Wordbook – import of the branch news
    • Virtual Bookshelf – not used very much
    • Where I’ve Been – not used very much
  • Information I find that might be of interest to others
    • Feed Friend RSS – primarily AAUW related RSS feeds
    • del.icio.us – primarily items tagged aauwtech
    • SlideShare (for slide shows written by others; I tend to post my own slides elsewhere)
  • Fundraising applications
    • Change.org – campaign based. Useful for linking nonprofits to a “change” to educate the change supporters about the mission and capacities of the nonprofit.
    • Changing the Present – campaigns linked to a specific nonprofit. Good for micro-payments to honor a friend or for a group to collaborate to raise a specific (usually not very large) sum. Seems well matched as a substitute for secret Santa gatherings — at least for groups that are just too serious for such frivolity as Dollar Store gifts.
    • Causes – campaigns linked to specific nonprofit. There’s no AAUW presence, and it’s not clear the volunteers are empowered to create one.
  • Social Networking applications
    • Introductions – allows me to introduce one friend to another
    • Top Groups – provides quick links to my most used groups (but has even less information about recent updates than the standard Groups application)
    • Interactive Friends Graph – works with Introductions to visualize friends who don’t yet connect

Current concerns

  • Very few apps work on pages. How to find good ones there is a challenge. In particular would like to use the notes feature, particularly if enabled to import a blog.
  • A simple training app like Flashcards would be helpful

More on Facebook pages

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In the previous post, I said

Groups offer “news”, “posted items” and “related groups” that don’t seem to have comparable features in “pages”.

Well, that’s not quite right. It seems that Facebook is moving in the direction of allowing folks to add applications to pages, not just individual profiles. In particular, the “Posted Items” application can be added and works well.

There are still major hurdles:

  • While you can browse through the applications that are appropriate for pages, any attempt to search sends you back to the apps appropriate for individual pages, so you have to click the application to see if it has the new “install this on a page” button.
  • Even if you do select to install the app on a page 3 or 4 of the ones I tried, ended up putting the new content on my profile, not on the page I was trying to edit. Maybe user error, but another savvy facebooker had the same problem, so at a minimum it’s a poor user interface. If anyone dopes this out, let me know.
  • Several Facebook-created apps are available for pages, but I did a complete sweep and didn’t see the Notes application (which would allow importing news from an external blog) or any other way to import from an RSS feed. I’ll ask the Facebook powers that be about that, but they don’t seem too sympathetic to that problem. [It’s not just “what’s in Facebook stays in Facebook” but also “if it wasn’t created in Facebook, why do you even care?”.]

Report back from Facebook …

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Well, this forum has been neglected in the last month while I’ve been spending time over in Facebook. Over the last month, a team of AAUW members has come together in Facebook — using both Facebook messaging and the discussion boards and Google docs they’ve produced an introduction to Facebook for AAUW members and that’s been advertised to the branch/state web managers e-mail list.

It’s been an interesting exercise, and we have plans to extend the introduction beyond its current state: applications, fundraising, etc. But, realistically, those will be goals for sometime in 2008 (perhaps coordinated with the release of information on the June 2008 student leader conference).

Do look for me on Facebook if you’ve got an interest in knowing more about my experiments there.

Lessons learned on Google Docs

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Recently, I’ve been part of a group that’s using Google docs to discuss a particular topic. While we’ve got a draft document as our deliverable, we’re still at the stage of figuring out what the outline of the document should be and drilling down in to a few fundamental questions. Essentially, we’re using Google docs as an “asynchronous chat room”. Here are a few lessons learned:

  1. Make sure everyone knows how to use the “insert comment” feature. That automatically signs, time-stamps and color codes comments. [Some folks were using the highlighter tool to color-code their comments.]
  2. Encourage folks to use a separate section of the document for “discussions” and to indent comments to show how the thread is evolving — e.g.

    Mary makes a comment on section xx

    Jane comments on Mary’s comment

    Alice replies with another comment on this same topic

    Sally starts a new thread

    Try to get people to keep separate topics separate. You can then do some quick cut and paste and/or indenting to show the “conversations”.

  3. Use the print icon to print the document with comments. At least in Firefox, print from the browser or Preview/print shows just the document, not the comments.
  4. Once you get to editing the document itself, you can also use comments and go back and “accept/reject” them, or make the edits in the document and uses the revision history to track the who and when.

If you’re doing this in a Facebook context, look at the Zoho application (like Google docs, but integrated with Facebook) or the Box application (uses Box.net) to share files of types that Facebook doesn’t allow you to upload directly. It might be easier to have the “discussions” on Facebook and leave the “document” as “just a document”.

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.