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dw_suggestions2010-06-28 06:47 pm
Crosspost to Facebook Notes
Title:
Crosspost to Facebook Notes
Area:
crossposting
Summary:
The crossposter sites option should have an option to "push" notes into facebook.com.
Description:
Facebook.com currently has a Notes feature. You can point it at a public RSS feed to import notes, but that fails to re-import edited notes.
I would prefer to "push" notes into facebook via the crossposter, so that edited notes show up correctly etc.
That may or may not be technically possible to do with facebook's note posting. I suspect it would require some reverse engineering of facebook page code etc.
There are complications around posting security - facebook does actually have the concept of custom posting security, and an extra "friends of friends" level.
Also I'm pretty sure there's no way to prevent comments on a note within facebook, so this option may be problematic.
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
14 (26.4%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (3.8%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
20 (37.7%)
(I have no opinion)
17 (32.1%)
(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)
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1) I am not generally a fan of features which have more to do with external services/websites than DW itself. If people want those sorts of tools (for whatever external service, be it facebook or twitter or tumblr or...), I would prefer an improved API to let people build them outside of DW itself.
2) I dislike Facebook culture and the style of interaction that happens there. I fear that making it easy to crosspost to Facebook would result in lots of people coming here from Facebook and bringing Facebook social norms, which are at odds with the social norms I enjoy here on DW. (For instance, things I enjoy on DW include: lengthy, thoughtful posts and comments, a respect for pseudonymity, and the ability to segregate one's journalling from one's "real life").
3) I have serious reservations about Facebook's privacy, and am concerned that any attempt to implement this for anything other than public posts would be fraught with difficulty.
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2) Yeah, the social norms thing definitely are valid concerns, but I actually suspect that facebookers are not likely to do anything other than comment directly on the facebook note. Particularly so since I don't think there's a way to disable facebook comments.
That said, I actually do quite frequently have lengthy, thoughtful posts and comments and discussions on facebook, particularly via the notes mechanism.
The pseudonymity thing does not play well, that is true. I'm happy being non-pseudonymous. Not everyone is, for sure.
3) Yep. Valid concern to have too. I would be entirely happy with a "purely on public entries" thing, if only because the security status mapping is quite problematic.
Facebook "friends" are not in the same security status vein as DW "friends", so "friends locked" has a different meaning.
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All of which would have to be addressed *somehow*, in code and documentation and support and everywhere else, even if it's only greying out options or whatever. Which sounds like a huge pile of code-cruft to me.
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The FB userbase may perhaps be a lot less security savvy and information control savvy - and they aren't particularly encouraged to be so by facebook, that is true.
The security settings are there and work, though.
Comment settings, yes, they would just have to be ignored.
Date modification, not sure about.
As I just replied to
I do think it's something that *could* be automated without any more or less difficulty than implementing another crossposting API.
There is always going to be a significant impedance mismatch once you push content out to another site with regards to security controls and other content controls.
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I do have to say, I don't think this is a high priority feature request. :-)
It's just something I happen to do by hand right now that it would be nicer to have automated.
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Allow crossposting to any site that has a functional API, that'd be grand.
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Actually, it'd also be grand to have Facebook profiles available as external user logins, that'd be very useful for some of us.
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FB actually supports logging into FB with an openID, but they don't support the reverse. That's extremely nasty of them, yes.
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Wordpress.com is my pet hate on this currently, a blog platform that supports OpenID, but doesn't allow you to log in using it to merely comment seems completely pointless to me.
However, I strongly disagree with Damned Colonial's reason above. I have no problem with my corner of Facebook, it doesn't have a culture I disagree with, and while I respect pseudonymity of others, fairly obviously, I don't follow it myself, never have (I'm involved, heavily, in politics, having an "anonymous" blog is a really bad idea).
More of my readers come to read my stuff from Twitter and Facebook than do from LJ or DW. Even more come from a UK politics aggregator (or at least did when I was posting regularly). I'd like them to be able to comment effectively. I'd also like to 'push' to those sites I make use of to aggregate my stuff.
Essentially, who are you (or anyone else) to determine what sort of culture I want in my personal journal, and why should a whole site be tarnished because some people don't like the bits they've seen?
I do plan on writing a suggestion for supporting other external IDs, which'd have to include Oauth for Twitter and probably Connect, and I think there's another one, but it needs some research.
(and please consider the slightly aggressive tone above in a "I know this is a hard thing to fight for so need to sort my arguments out" way, I don't know how to word it in a way that doesn't let my frustration show).
Honestly, I didn't sign up for a fandom blogging platform, I signed up for an LJ fork that would take the good idea and make it genuinely interoperable. Refusing to deal with other sites because there are "normal" people there and they have a "culture I don't want to see here" is, well, annoying.
The way the votes have gone almost completely against this idea, despite it being a fairly basic one, also annoys me, we need interoperability, it's one of the sites USPs, rejecting interoperability with a site that about 50% of online people have an account with is just daft.
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*nods*
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Refactoring crossposting to do anything more than LJ codebase sites would already be a pretty significant investment.
Commenting wearing my software engineering hat, code is best designed to either deal with one specific case, or else a general case with hooks for specifics.
Crossposting code is in the "one specific case" basket right now - which is fine.
If you're refactoring the code to be general, then it often pays to make it properly general, and hit at least 3 different targets, so you can be sure that adding more later is not painful.
Facebook doesn't have to be one of those targets, but this suggestion is just suggesting that it could be. :-)
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If we're counting "number of people who might use it" as a worth it measure, then, well, like it or not, Facebook has a very huge number of people on it. Yes, the intersection between FB users and DW users is probably not immense... but any other weblog APIs also have a pretty small intersection, I suspect.
There is of course a risk of FB changing it, resulting in the feature stopping functioning until it's fixed - but I haven't seen that particular chunk of FB change much.
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Just about everything with Facebook is Facebook specific. I don't think we should get into the making Facebook better business.
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Facebook is one of the biggest supporters of Open Source out there at the moment, most importantly memcache, but a whole host of other things.
IIRC, they rejected OpenID as a platform for the simple reason that the UX sucks, big time, and wasn't likely to improve anytime soon, so they created Connect partially as a challenge to OpenID to get its act in gear.
OpenID has had no serious development since 2007. The UX still sucks. Facebook connect, OTOH, is dead easy, dead effective, and very useful. I use it to comment on various blogs fairly regularly.
I agree that specific site coding isn't necessarily a good thing, but Facebook is so massive, and open source projects in general, and OpenID as a specific, could learn masses from their commitment to a good user friendly experience.
Sure, there are many many flaws with it, but some of it is really really well done.
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I don't think we should be in a "make your [non-Dreamwidth] account more useful" business, which I think building code to let you login from one particular website, or repost to one particular website, is. I'm not hostile to Facebook. I'd like us to move away from LJ-interoperable tools into more generally web interoperable tools, for instance.
But, I'm also not convinced by, "Half the internet has Facebook accounts" arguments, because there's no way to know when a quarter of the internet will start abandoning their Facebook accounts. Remember when Myspace was The Social Network? Now, it's what bands use instead of building a real website.
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FB engineering clearly has a serious clue. Have you even heard whispers of a facebook outage? I haven't, and it would be all over the media if there was one. Twitter, on the other hand...
That's actually the same reason I'm here rather than on LJ - DW development actually has a serious clue and is set up to retain that clue, LJ development clearly doesn't any more, and that's my professional opinion as a software engineer/architect.
Don't get me wrong - Facebook certainly have some dodgy practices going on in the sense that they're an ad supported company, so it's in their interests to keep data flowing the advertisers way. That's a business model disagreement, and a lot of people may not like it, but ultimately, they're conducting a legal business (now that they've sorted out some privacy controls to fit a variety of privacy legislation), using pretty much exactly the same business model as Google.
The question for DW is not "should DW be helping other companies". That's got nothing to do with it.
The questions should be "would providing this functionality be in the interests of DW and its membership?" and "is the cost of creating and maintaining the functionality too high?"
For this poll, I think the answer is "yes, a little bit" and "at the moment it's too high, but maybe not if the crossposter is refactored a lot to support multiple different APIs".
With regards to a hypothetical FB Connect/Twitter OAUTH poll, I think the answer is "maybe" (primarily because OpenID actually does suck to use, I know DW is trying to improve it, yes), and the implementation work isn't immense.
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