Blog Oklahoma / Blog

First off, I'm about to rant a bit about Facebook. I'm going give you the impression that I really dislike Facebook. This isn't the case. Blog Oklahoma's Facebook community is growing, and is becoming an important part of our interaction with each other. This rant is specifically on how Facebook posts to Twitter, an equally important part of the Blog Oklahoma community.

Last night Facebook change some things in how they handle posting that just convinced me to stop posting to Twitter from Blog Oklahoma's Facebook Page. This doesn't mean I'm going to stop posting to our Facbeook Page or to Twitter. Actually if anything I'll be posting more to both, but I'm going to be doing it separately from now on (sort of).

The main reason is I don't like how Facebook kept adding links back to itself when posting to Twitter. Now I can understand doing this for posts longer than 140 characters, but Facebook started doing it for all posts. Oh and for me Facebook has never handled posting shared "links" correctly. Not only had Facebook changed the "link" post format, on more than one occasion I might add, but the link they posted to Twitter was back to Facebook's shared links page and not to the actual shared "link".

The final straw came last night when Facebook started echoing posts from Ping.fm. I use Ping.fm as part of my back office process to post the new member notices to the various social networks. Up until last night when you used Ping.fm, Facebook didn't echo that post via the Twitter sync. I liked that. It meant I could use Ping.fm for all sorts of things without worrying about double posting.

All this lead me to feeling the constant linking back to Facebook was hurting our Twitter conversation. So last night I unlinked @blogoklahoma from the Blog Oklahoma Facebook page.

I can understand the convenience of having only one place to post and have it echo to all the other places. Hey that's why I like Ping.fm. But in retrospect, the convenience Facebook offered wasn't really all that convenient.

The way Facebook was posting to Twitter had me starting to think I was giving the impression posting to Twitter was an afterthought. That I didn't really care about the Twitter audience. Now granted I don't know or even really think if any of you thought that, and honestly I'm probably making too big deal about it, but I was starting to think that.

So from now on I'll be posting to both Twitter and Facebook, but in a format of my choosing, and not how Facebook wants it to look. There are several tools available to accomplish this. One is the fore mentioned Ping.fm for posting. Another is Seesmic Desktop. Seesmic Desktop not only lets me post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, but I can monitor both communities very easily.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. So please feel free to join the conversation. Post a comment, @blogoklahoma on Twitter, or post on our wall over at Facebook.