Friday, December 18, 2009
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Soon after publishing my last post "Google's Starfish" here, I was very (unpleasantly) surprised to discover the whole post appear as a "note" on my Facebook page. I wouldn't have even noticed that, unless someone post a comment on that post, inside Facebook.
In the past, I did, on my own will, configure the RSS of pashabitz.com to appear on my Facebook.
But still, my natural reaction was to get extremely pissed, even though no explicit rule was probably broken here by Facebook. I've been trying to figure out why I got so mad. Here's what I came up with:

Change of the rules
Facebook changed the behavior in a non-trivial way without asking me first. Commonly, other sites only syndicate a small part of the external content and point back to the original. This is what Facebook did in the past too.
They still have a link to the "original post", but it is very non prominent.

Stealing content...
The whole text of my post on this blog appears as a standard Facebook entity (the "note") virtually exactly as if it was published on Facebook itself. There is absolutely zero motivation and additional value for the reader to click-through to my own site, where I actually posted the content. Also remember that Google doesn't like seeing the exact same content on two different URLs.

...and making money off that content
Guess what - Facebook display an ad on the "note" page which is a copy of my blog post. They get the money for showing that ad.


What do you think?

Bookmark and Share Friday, December 18, 2009 8:59:42 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    Comments [4]  
Saturday, December 19, 2009 12:31:24 AM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)
Are you _sure_ this is a new behavior for your blog? My posts have been appearing on Facebook as notes for at least a year if not more. I did set it up deliberately though, via twitter's "bird feeder" plugin. I'm now publishing just the post's title with a link to my blog post, to encourage the commenting to take place only in one place.

Besides the commenting issue I'm not sure there's a real problem - Google Reader is showing your content for ages, although they don't advertise - but it's just a business decision not to place ads there, they could if they wanted to. You could always limit what's on your RSS feed to just a short part of the post with a "see more" link, but I've always hated it when bloggers do that and that discourages faithful readers.

Saturday, December 19, 2009 8:28:18 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)
I was not using any third party syndication tool. This is Facebook's own syndication - you can add an RSS feed to your profile page.
In the past they used to show only a title and optional image. Clicking the title would take you to the original post at pashabitz.com.
Displaying the whole post as a note is new behavior.

Google Reader is a different situation: that's a *consumer* side tool. That's one reader of my blog who decided to consume it via Google Reader. I don't mind readers consuming the blog in a any way they choose.
With Facebook, it's done on the *publisher* side. None of my Facebook friends opted-in to consume my blog on Facebook instead of on pashabitz.com.
As far as they're concerned, it appears as if *I* am publishing it on Facebook.
Thursday, December 24, 2009 6:05:36 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)
I noticed this too, a few days ago. I think this is plain abuse; there are any number of reasons why this is "not cool" (although, I expect, not actually illegal), but the most important is: they do not send content back. If I comment on your note, this doesn't show up as a comment on your blog. The other little annoyances I can handle, but this is simply not being a good neighbor; even blogs have trackbacks (a crappy, inelegant implementation but it does work).

Thursday, January 14, 2010 6:00:59 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)
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