WalkingRandomly page on Facebook

August 22nd, 2012 | Categories: walking randomly | Tags:

Someone recently asked me if WalkingRandomly.com had a facebook page.  Since it wasn’t much effort to create one, I have now done so.  I have no idea if this will be of any use to anyone but a first stab at it is at http://www.facebook.com/Walkingrandomly 

Now I have to decide what to do with it. Does anyone have any thoughts on a blog such as this having its own facebook profile?  Is it a good idea?  Will anyone make use of it or is it just pointless?

  1. Michael
    August 22nd, 2012 at 15:18
    Reply | Quote | #1

    On my perspective, the sad part about facebook is that a few of my contacts likes this kind of blog, I got here by chance, if not in twitter, in G+, by people who has similar interests and that I don’t have in fb (because haven’t meet them in person).

    Yet, many blogs are switching to fb and their old followers go with them, but I don’t know about getting new audience…

    If people only write in fb, they are losing potential audience, I think.

    In conclusion, I still don’t know if its pointless… (but I’ll follow there too)

  2. August 22nd, 2012 at 15:55
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Thanks for that Michael. I’ll be doing all of my writing right here at walkingrandomly.com so there will be no change there. At the moment I plan to use Facebook as another way of letting people know about page updates..essentially like another RSS feed.

    In the good old days everyone visited manually whenever they felt like it or used RSS to be notified of updates. At some point I was asked if I could mirror my feed to twitter…so I did ( http://twitter.com/walkingrandomly ), some time later someone told me that they like to consume content on google and would I add posts there…so I did ( https://plus.google.com/108930714356162091073#108930714356162091073/posts ) and now we have facebook as well.

    I just see them all as RSS platforms with bells and whistles on to be honest

  3. Piefrancesco
    August 22nd, 2012 at 16:11
    Reply | Quote | #3

    I agree on “I just see them all as RSS platforms”, for a blogger/company social networks are RSS-like platforms (with fancy graphics maybe).

    I don’t know if you copy and paste links on facebook, anyway there are some cool applications, like RSS graffiti, that post your blog updates (if the blog has an RSS feed) automatically on fb.

  4. August 22nd, 2012 at 16:23
    Reply | Quote | #4

    At the moment I am copying and pasting links. I tried RSS graffiti but couldn’t get it to work. I forget what the error message was but it was something particularly unhelpful like ‘An error has occurred’ so I gave up for now.

    It seems that many people used to use the Notes facebook application to publish RSS feeds but FaceBook subsequently disabled this http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-to-kill-rss-support-for-notes/5181

    I also can’t see a way to moderate comments on the facebook page in a similar way to WordPress. There are moderation options but they are a bit feeble IMHO.

  5. poi
    August 22nd, 2012 at 16:40
    Reply | Quote | #5

    How much good electricity is converted to low grade heat by all this signaling?

    per isakson

  6. Rafael
    August 22nd, 2012 at 16:44
    Reply | Quote | #6

    I hope this blog won´t be discontinued in favor of Facebook, can´t anyboby see that it´s privatising the internet? I´m feeling a bit outcast these days…

  7. August 22nd, 2012 at 17:16
    Reply | Quote | #7

    @poi loads!

    @Rafael Not a chance. Ideally, I’d like to own the platform I publish on. This is a self-hosted blog managed by a company run by a friend of mine so its close enough. I’m just experimenting with the Facebook page as an alternative RSS feed for those who choose to follow the blog that way.

    All content will remain here.

  8. Bibi
    August 22nd, 2012 at 20:36
    Reply | Quote | #8

    In my opinion is pointless…
    I agree with Michael and Rafael.

    Actually, despite what is being said nowdays in the news, I believe that the only value that Facebook has in general is its stocks!

    I will try to buy some in a few days that the price will fall more.

    The reason for my decision is that despite I don’t use Facebook at all, in my vacations, in a crowded tourist place in Greece, I noticed that almost 95% (maybe more) of the people (from all over the world) that used their mobile devices and PCs to connect to internet, they were using Facebook.

    Facebook everywere. Actually I was embarrased that I was the only person entering walkingrandomly.com.

    Everybody talking to friends through Facebook and me Matlab and Mathematica news…
    I think I am a geek……

  9. August 22nd, 2012 at 21:01
    Reply | Quote | #9

    I don’t think that there’s much value in its stocks to be honest

  10. August 23rd, 2012 at 07:15

    I think many people use Facebook mainly for personal connections (ie, friends, parties), you may be better off with Twitter or G+

  11. August 23rd, 2012 at 11:41

    Yeah, don’t buy Facebook shares, the fair value still lies well below $10 IMO.

    As for the topic, I don’t have a Facebook account either so I don’t really care either way. I’m old-fashioned, RSS and a proper blog are good enough for me!

  12. enedene
    August 24th, 2012 at 20:34

    Good move.
    I’d suggest that G+ would be even a better move, since people circle people with similar interests.

  13. pierfrancesco
    August 26th, 2012 at 19:40

    @talk about fb: fb is not evil nor bad, is simple another mean, and anyway with rss application one can share it’s blog updates on each main social network so there is no need to move a blog entirely on a social network. Moreover, in my opinion, fb expressiveness is really high (1) but this is another story.

    @RSS impoter on facebook: if RSS graffiti doesn’t work (is a 2.0 beta) check the fb app center, there are 3-4 alternatives to import an RSS feed. I hope this helps :)

    1. way more than 140 char dogma ‘twitter’, and equal to g+. But i must admit that almost all science sources have a twitter feed in fact i have done a fb page that import the Rss feed of a twitter’s list (it’s mine) that contains a lot of streams of science news.

  14. Piefrancesco
    August 27th, 2012 at 14:32

    there are some alternatives to RSS graffiti: https://www.facebook.com/search/results.php?q=rss&type=apps