In their infinite wisdom, facebook have decided to remove the ability to import notes from an RSS feed.

ie the feature I've been using for the past however long, to cross post my blog posts to facebook, so there's more chance of people actually reading them!

The only explanation given is for why you can no longer import to pages:

We want you to connect with your fans in the most effective ways possible. [...] The best way to get people to interact with your content is to give them insight into the links you share on your Wall by adding personal comments and responding to feedback from fans.

Which is probably all well and good if you're a business/celebrity/whatever and are using facebook to try and drum up business or otherwise raise your profile (side note: why?!).  But I'm not - I have 'friends', not 'fans', and I thought the whole point of profiles vs pages is that they are for different purposes and thus work in different ways!

Conspiracy theories and general cynicism suggest it's because facebook want complete and full control over all your content, so therefore it must be better to force you to add it directly, where they can shower you with adverts.  I suspect the new timeline and opengraph stuff may also have something to do with it.

I'd like to know why it's no longer ok for me to import blog posts, but it's fine (and, indeed, encouraged) for people to spam newsfeeds with what songs they've listened to on Spotify, or what articles they've just read on the Guardian/Independent/other online newspaper.  Thank fuck for the 'hide' option!

Semi-related, but this has also finally given me the kick needed to play with the Twitter API so I can auto-tweet blog posts.  Which took far longer than the 5 minutes I thought it would, due to annoying OAuth authentication errors.... turns out because I needed to install the pear oauth module.  Would have been nice to realise this sooner, ie some sort of list of server requirements, but hey ho.

tags: grr websites