Lurking in on the Wall of the Facebook group I and a few others run for users of our organisation, was a post plugging a new Facebook app for a graduate recruitment marketing company (in other words, the competition). Whilst it bordered on the edge of a brand management posting, the application behind it turned out to be a little more interesting, being put together by a company called RSS2Facebook. For a $100, they’ll send you a Facebook app ready to deploy, provided you’ve got the suite of tools ready to handle it.
Of course, they don’t say what will happen when Facebook move the goalposts (again) and the feed stops working (see comment 7).
Worth £50? If all you’ll intending to do is distribute a feed, then probably. Certainly, we’re tempted.
Other interesting Facebook noise generated recently focuses on Facebook’s moves towards becoming an open platform. Dave Winer applauds their first steps but feels they have a long way to go. Fred Wilson wants status updates to go straight into Twitter. So do I – I don’t like having to choose where I post updates and I really don’t like posting the same update twice. The status update feed is broken for me – I can’t see any friends’ updates prior to August 6 – and I really can’t be bothered to set it up again. Platform stability continues to be a bit of an issue for Facebook.
Presumably that’s a consequence of a positively exponentially high growth, though MySpace still leads in mobile social network usage according to figures from m:metric (via Read/WriteWeb). Perhaps Facebook would do better if their mobile experience wasn’t quite so appalling – 200kb and counting takes a long time to load up on GPS.
Meanwhile, CNET discusses a Sophos report that demonstrates how many people are happy to let pretty much anyone be their friends. Oh, and is Zuckerman seriously trying to patent social networking? Donna Bogatin thinks so.
Filed under: facebook applications, facebook feeds, mobile
I used that RSS2Facebook thing and it worked a treat, I would recommend it to any small blog owner who believes in their own content. It really levels the playing field.