What happened with Ping.fm and Facebook?
I have been using Ping.fm for some time now to assist in the never ending battle on updating the different social networks that each have their own little groups of friends. I gave up on watching each one myself. It’s just too much to keep up with and my time could be much more valuable doing other things. But this doesn’t change the fact that you will NEVER move all of your online communities to one location. I thought I had it worked out for the most part by using a combination of RSS feeds and Ping.fm. I could update in one location and then Ping.fm would then blast it off to the locations I set up. This process that I spent A LOT of time setting up just fell apart. And I have yet to find a full reason why, or if it can be fixed any time in the near future.
What am I complaining about?
When Ping.fm posted my updates to my Facebook Fan Page (I don’t use it for my private personal profile), it posted them just as though I posted on the page itself. What do I mean by this? Well the only indication that it was posted somewhere other than Facebook was just the words “via Ping.fm” next to the date of the post. No icons or any other labels. But more importantly was how links were posted. Any time I posted a link to a photo site (such as Flickr), the link expanded out with a thumbnail of the image to help preview before followers click through. When I posted a link to a site or page, again it would expand out with a preview. But also these links were added to my pages “Links” section for easy reviewing or tracking back though previous links. This style of post also allowed Facebook to place a “Share” link under each link post as well. This assisted with easy sharing of this content via those that follow the feed.
What happens now? Whatever changes were made, via Facebook or Seesmic, now cause the usefulness of the service to drop drastically for me. Now with each update there is a blue “P” icon that appears directly under the post as well as a “Join Ping.fm” link at the end. I am using the service and I fully understand that they would want and need to advertise themselves and promote the service. This doesn’t bother me in the least. Until these issues, I myself was praising the service often. This change is just what made me take notice of what else changed.
What I found was that the three things I liked most about posting to my Facebook Page via Ping.fm no longer occurred.
- Photos and links no longer expanded out from the posts. The text link now just posts inline with the status.
- These links are no longer added to the “Links” section of the Facebook Page.
- And due to this Facebook can no longer add the “Share” link to these posts.
I have stated my frustration to Seesmic (who now own Ping.fm) via twitter (@askseesmic). They responded with a link that didn’t seem related to my issues at all. This made me think that they didn’t fully understand what I was saying on twitter due to the short format. That’s why I made this post.
I guess I am going to go back to daily updating the page by hand until this changes or something better comes along. I am open to any suggestions if anyone has some.
(All images are of updates that were posted through Ping.fm.)
Thanks for reading my rant!
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