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Syndicated Content on Facebook

Facebook started out as a social networking platform but has since evolved into a more complete "portal" environment (dare I use that word - it got badly associated with bloat the last few years). Pretty-much everything is syndicated into Facebook these days - links, photos, videos, news, you name it!

The other day we had an extremely interesting discussion in the comments on a post on iMod about a new Facebook news application.

One of the pretty common things I see around South African news syndication applications is that they particularly focus on placing information onto the profiles of the users who add them. This does not really make sense to me at all; profile pages are for information relating to a particular user surely, not for general syndicated content?

My solution has been to syndicate stuff onto a separate canvas page up to thus far. However, as Chris put it on one of his comments:

[...] I stick to my limitation of select applications on my profile, so I don’t have to click around so much [...]

That makes a lot of sense to me as well. For example, think about iGoogle. It allows you to get a good overview of the day's happenings without going to a lot of separate pages.

So, essentially we want the ability to have separate boxes on one page, but not necessarily on somebody's profile. What's the point of placing stuff on your own profile if it's mainly for you to read? Isn't your profile for other people primarily? You don't want to see all of your own personal information (which you already know, I presume?) and other people don't want to read all your favourite newsfeeds necessarily. If they come to your profile page, they probably want to find out more about you.

Reducing bloat on profile pages is definitely on the list of priorities for Facebook and this really points out a limitation in Facebook's framework that would help. Obviously this is a use that has evolved over time so there was no way they could have foreseen this. The fact is that Facebook is starting to replace the function of services such as iGoogle in some ways. It allows you the functionality of being able to read your news and interact with your friends all on one site and even integrate the two activities (like with "share this" buttons and who knows what else into the future).

Ideally the user needs a separate page, a bit like the homepage with all their friends' activities, but filled with individual boxes that can be added and populated by different applications much in the same way as on profiles.

Then, we can make the profile pages much cleaner and more focused, and let the user have their own page for their choice of syndicated content.

Obviously we can also allow the user to easily publish a list of their favourite news sources on their profile pages and even expose this new "news" page (or parts thereof) to other people. "What does Charl like to read?"

Read the comments on iMod for more discussion about this.

Posted by Charl van Niekerk on Tuesday, April 22, 2008
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1 Comments

Comment by Anonymous Chris M on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 7:46:00 AM

Thanks for the link back mate, I was also enjoying the discussion. Nothing better than a proper tech talk with some good strong valid points!

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