I’ve posted previously about how much control third party and cloud computing services have over your information and how it will only get worse. Guess what: it just got worse.
For well over a year, I’ve imported the RSS feed from my blog to Facebook via the Notes application. This particular feature has been flaky in the past and now appears to be completely broken despite cries to fix it. I’m betting my bottom dollar that the poor implementation and maintenance of the blog import feature is deliberate on Facebook’s part: they want you to stay within their walled garden and keep all of your content solely within it.
Before last week, anything I posted on my blog would take up to three days to show up on Facebook. Occasionally, I would make several posts and they would all show up out of order several days later. To make posts show up immediately, I had to log in to Facebook and manually update the blog import. Several days is an eternity for a service that depends on real time information, especially when I get 20 or 30 wall posts every hour. Why should my blog posts be treated differently than wall posts? Google has real time search for the entire internet, but Facebook can’t keep up with a handful of RSS feeds for new blog posts? It’s obvious that Facebook could easily make an import feature that functions in real time and would allow you to import anything from anywhere. So why haven’t they done this?
Now, however, the Facebook blog import feature appears to be completely broken. After writing a blog post last week and then trying to manually import it, I got the following obtuse error from Facebook: “The blog/rss url you entered is not valid. “ I got no such errors from Feed Validator. I also thought it could be because I had upgraded to WordPress 3.0, but a discussion thread revealed that plenty of people with other blogging services were also having trouble importing to Facebook. After a week and a half, I have a hard time believing that Facebook would allow a bug like this to go ignored without some kind of acknowledgment or fix. What are they up to?
My guess is that Facebook deliberately broke the blog import feature, thinking that those who used it would just forget about it and start posting to Facebook directly. If true, it’s quite the subversive attempt to gain even more control over my information. I’m certainly not going to abandon my blog just because I can’t import it into Facebook. My guess is that the more restrictions like this that Facebook imposes, the more incentivized people will be to abandon their accounts. Changing privacy policies at the drop of a hat may not be enough to convince Facebook users to leave, but I’m betting that restricting users’ control of their own data will be the last straw.
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