Tool to post links to DW entries on Facebook

[cesy]

Title:
Tool to post links to DW entries on Facebook

Area:
rss, inter-site stuff

Summary:
Facebook Notes integration tool.

Description:
Background:
I know it's possible to put your DW entries on Facebook through RSS/Notes but some people deliberately don't use that as they don't want to put content onto Facebook itself - merely provide a link to the original here on Dreamwidth - without actually having to manually share a link each and every time.

You can set your RSS feed to provide just titles, and importing that to Facebook would probably achieve this, but that means you can't then provide the full RSS feed to other people.

Could you produce the titles-only RSS feed as well as the full one, or is there a better way of doing it?

Suggestion:
Create a tool or method to allow people to link to their DW entries from Facebook automatically without having to post the content on Facebook.

Poll #1417 Tool to post links to DW entries on Facebook

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 37

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
11 (29.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
4 (10.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
1 (2.7%)

(I have no opinion)
19 (51.4%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (5.4%)

Comments

[zarhooie]

I hate Facebook and think that Dreamwidth should avoid association with it by any means necessary.

[triadruid]

So this will never affect you, since it's an app to push data TO Facebook, which you'll never see.

[zarhooie]

Note that I didn't vote against it. I just chose other. :)

I still think it's useless and silly, but I'm usually also against special-casing things for single-use things in most cases. If DW special-cases Facebook, I can EASILY see it snowballing and suddenly there will be a thousand and one other sites that we are special-casing.

[katieastrophe]

We're already special-casing YouTube with regards to flash embedding so arguing against special-casing Facebook in case it starts off special-casing other sites is not really an argument, imo.

[katieastrophe]

I use Facebook to keep up with the people I know who use neither LJ nor DW, so having a way to go "oi, look at this thing I posted" without any intervention of my own, rather than giving Facebook's evil overlords the data itself as RSS/notes does.

Ideally, I'd like to see something like LJ had going with the Facebook Beacon that literally provided the link, but I'm aware that there was massive amounts of security worries with that, so obviously not THAT solution, but something like it.

[foxfirefey]

I think associating with Facebook is a *great* idea, because people who do integrate DW with their Facebook (not that people have to) might attract new users from the best possible pool (people who already know somebody on the site). Facebook does some things well, but longer form blog content and communities is not one of them. And having people able to use their DW as a blog that integrates almost seamlessly with Facebook might even encourage them to use their DW more.

Facebook is huge and lots of people have accounts in both places. I don't know of many other sites that will have the same effort to pay off ratio, so I don't think working for interoperatability with Facebook will be the start of a snowball of doom--additionally, Facebook has good APIs to do things like this with, which helps lower the bar.

[janinedog]

I'm wondering if this will be satisfied once bug 1840 is done? It sounds like you could just share the entry after it's posted (to Facebook or elsewhere), and then it'd appear on Facebook. What do you think?

[cesy]

That would help a little, but that would mean doing something manually every time - what's wanted is for it to be shared automatically each time you post a new entry, so like cross-posting, but cross-posting only titles, not full entries.

[aveleh]

If there's no API for posting to Facebook (aka, if it can't be done via the crossposter), I'd rather see this generalized by making it so that in addition to the default RSS feed, you can always access an RSS feed with *less* information than the default.

aka, I can use http://aveleh.dreamwidth.org/data/rss as is, but also request a title-only feed from http://aveleh.dreamwidth.org/data/rss?show=title (or something similar).

[cesy]

Yes, that sounds like a good solution, and could be useful for other sites as well.

[zvi]

+1

[sophie]

I like this.

[denise]

Hey, just to let you know -- I'm marking this as 'rejected', but there is bug 935, which will likely do a lot of what you want :)

[cesy]

Ah, cool, thanks.

[acb]

I think there should be an option to (a) post only a title to Facebook, (b) post an arbitrary-sized excerpt (first sentence, first paragraph, up until the cut?) with a link, or (c) post the whole thing as a note. In the former two cases, a DW Facebook app which links to the user's DW account and posts to the user's stream would be a good way to do it.

Most of my friends don't use DW or LJ, but do use Facebook. Having a means to invite people into DW/LJ and also update those who don't have any intention of joining (let's face it, if one's not into keeping a journal/blog and has only one friend who uses one, it's a bit of a hard sell) would be great.

[cesy]

With the approved bug that someone else linked to, you'll be able to choose to import either a) only a title, b) post with cuts (i.e. how it appears on a friends page) or c) whole thing (as it appears on the actual entry) into Facebook notes.

[acb]

Is this for friends-only posts? Does it allow you to select posts by security level (either group or tag)?

[cesy]

No, it only works for public posts. I think you can do it for a particular tag as well.

Another useful modification

[acb]

A means of posting one's own posts which are not open to the public to Facebook. Since one's Facebook feed is by default open only to one's own FB friends (and they're now adding LJ-style subgroup permissions) it's quite conceivable that one would want to share one's posts with authenticated DW/LJ friends and authenticated FB friends but not the general public.

Re: Another useful modification

[cesy]

That should probably be its own suggestion, if you don't mind submitting it separately - this one's already been voted on by most people.