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Exporting your dataYou can export your data on Facebook by:
Alternatively, freedom.io (source) can copy all of your posts, photos, checkins, etc. to WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger, creating a new blog post for each, with the original dates and all comments, etc. intact. To export all photos in an album owned by others (such as all photos in which you are tagged): To export Facebook messages:
POSSE out toMain article: POSSE to Facebook
There are multiple ways to POSSE out some things from your indieweb site to your Facebook profile. Specifically, you can POSSE posts and event RSVPs, but as of the 2.x Facebook API, not comments or likes. Comments and likes can't be PESOSed either. Existing techniques: from Twitter
IFTTT
BridgyYou can use Bridgy to POSSE Facebook posts and event RSVPs. Details here. Bridgy used to support POSSEing comments and likes, but Facebook's 2.x API disabled that. Facebook APIMain article: POSSE to Facebook
Posting to one's wall is supported with the Facebook 'Graph API'. See POSSE to Facebook for details and examples. For broader overview of the Facebook API, see the Social Web WG analysis: PESOS fromYou can use the Facebook API to PESOS your posts, but as of the 2.x API, not your comments or likes.
Features(this section is a stub, when it has been more well filled-in, move to top of page after dfn, similar to Twitter page)
Facebook has a number of interesting post types, each with different appearances and interfaces. Some better than others. Status UpdateStatus updates are notes similar to Twitter tweets, that, including status updates with links (see below) are perhaps the most common type of top-level post on FB. LinkLinks posts are essentially status updates, but they have a different presentation due to the link-preview that is shown for the first link mentioned in the update. PhotoPhoto posts are perhaps the second most popular type of top-level post on FB. EventMain article: event#Facebook
Facebook's event posts were quite clean and nicely designed, until they started rolling out a new design on 2014-02-27. Here is the design just before that point:
Sometime in 2015(?specific date), Facebook launched a new event UI which includes:
CommentComments are perhaps the overall most popular type of post, as people comment A LOT on other top-level posts, and Facebook has a two level notion of comment threading. That is, you can both comment on top-level posts, and comment on comments on top-level posts. The above event post screenshot demonstrates this two level commenting interface. AggregatorFacebook performs the function of a feed aggregator of all your friends' activities. Some examples screenshots can be found here: Analysis of some of the algorithms Facebook uses to choose what to display to users: Comments EmbedFacebook has a feature called Comments Box which "is a social plugin that enables user commenting on your site." Indieweb sites can use it to embed a comments box on blog posts. Though this does encourage your readers to sharecrop (on Facebook) their comments on your posts, it also provides them a single place to view their comments they've made across any/all sites that use Facebook for comments. No indieweb community members are currently using this on their own sites. IndieWeb community members that have tried this and their experience:
Anti-patternsSome things that Facebook implements are actually anti-patterns and to be avoided:
Activities Examples
rel-meFacebook does not currently support rel-me on their user profiles. However, they do have a "website" field in the UI which you can set. And then applications that wish to use that field for a one-off rel-me equivalence test can access that through their API: Careful parsing it, people often put multiple whitespace- or newline-separated urls. CriticismSummary on nearly all of the issues of Facebook: Get your loved ones off Facebook.
Algorithmic FilteringFacebook uses a proprietary algorithm to show you a fraction (what they think you want to see) of the posts from your friends, and people & pages you follow. Up to 85% less than "all".[3] This has been criticized many times.
API DegradationVersion 2.0[4] of the Facebook API mostly makes sensible changes to help tamp down spammy or privacy-violating apps (e.g. prevents you from seeing a user's friends unless the friends have also granted privileges to the app). But this change has broken some features that IndieWeb sites and Bridgy Publish depend on. Full discussion on IRC
API InconsistencyThe ID for a number of comments has changed over time, resulting in Bridgy sending apparently duplicate mentions to the same post. The symptom is that the same comment will be received with an ID of the form USERID_POSTID, and later the same comment will have an ID with a different form, containing colons and apparently magic numbers.[5] On 2015-04-07, Facebook support let us know that this "IDs like these can appear sometimes", and that it will not be fixed. DowntimeThough typically rare and brief, Facebook does go down / offline from time to time, most recently. 2014-08-01 Outage2014-08-01 CNBC: Facebook goes down for many users
Prefers Pageviews Over Efficient UXPer the documentation in reader#Integrated_Activity_Reading, one of Facebook's UI experiments involved an integrated reading experience that showed by posts and other "activities" in a single reading stream:
What they found was that it was too efficient - users were reading things and not clicking to see additional pages. Thus they abandoned the experiment, instead preferring a UI that generates more pageviews over a UI that is more efficient for users. This may present an opportunity for IndieWeb UX to exceed silo UX. Link Wrapper ProblemsLink Wrapper UnreliabilityFacebook's link wrapper lm.facebook.com sometimes has outages, thus breaking all links in content in Facebook. E.g. 2014-08-10 ~21:25-21:32 (at least)
Hyperlink Fear Interstitial
Facebook mobile app (apparently) warning the user about Twitter t.co link-wrapped links as having "a problem". via https://twitter.com/kyle_wm/status/446818317408280576 Harmful to Body Image
Hand-approval required to post via APIUnless the application developer is the only user, Facebook now requires applications to be hand-approved by the Facebook team if they are to post to a user's stream. This requires an application logo, complete screenshot walkthrough, and full privacy policy. Big data collection allows intrusive inferenceFacebook's big data collection allows intrusive inference about you
Social experiment performed on users
Is BoringPer grafitti in Minneapolis, 2014-234, photo by
"FACEBOOK IS BORING *IRL*" Real Name demandsWhile not as bad as Google+, Facebook have been attempting to enforce the "real name" policy. In 2014-09, it was revealed Facebook had disabled the accounts of a number of drag queens requiring them to use their legal names. [7] 2014-09-17: Accounts which don't seem like they have "normal" names have also been challenged by Facebook's policy. [8] 2015-06-26: Facebook disabled a user's account because of their name, the same name they used to work for and get paid by Facebook as an employee: Image used in link previewOn 2014-09-29, when I pasted a link to a blog post in a Facebook status, the link preview used one of the comment's avatars instead of the After using Facebook's Open Graph Object Debugger, I found it reported: og:image was not defined, could not be downloaded or was not big enough. Please define a chosen image using the og:image metatag, and use an image that's at least 200x200px and is accessible from Facebook. The image I'm using currently is only ~120px square. I guess that explains it, but it seems silly for Facebook to ignore the explicit Duplicate Events Created without ConfirmationOn 2014-10-20 I ( Encourages Bad Online Publishing Behaviors
Facebook use causes decline in satisfaction2013-04-17 The Economist: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life! Using the social network seems to make people more miserable
But an earlier investigation, conducted by social scientists at Humboldt University and Darmstadt’s Technical University, both in Germany, may have found the root cause. These researchers, who presented their findings at a conference in Leipzig in February, surveyed 584 users of Facebook aged mostly in their 20s. They found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bons mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed. Real-life encounters, by contrast, are more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).Emphasis added. Live user frustration testFacebook deliberately artificially crashed their Android app as a live (unbeknownst to the users) user-test to test frustration / abandonment! https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/684124629963685888 and https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/684125090527752194: Reinforcing shallow dopamine responses
AdvocatesRobert Scoble defended using Facebook in a post, "What will you miss when you quit Facebook?" 1. Filtered feed. Truth is this is a mixed bag. For me it's a HUGE deal because I have put thousands of hours into tuning my feed and I have many of the world's top technologists on Facebook. Someday Facebook will change something (or just disappear), and all these hours will be wasted. Imagine if he'd spent just 1/10th of that time working on his own site. — MottosFacebook has some development mottos that we can perhaps learn from. Move Fast And Break ThingsFrom ??? until 2014-04-30, Facebook infamously had the motto:
Even in their IPO paperwork[9] Move Fast With Stable InfraOn 2014-04-30[10], in a public announcement, Facebook changed their motto to:
ArticlesArticles that may provide insights on how to motivate individuals to move from Facebook to the indieweb (most recent first):
FAQWatch video without FlashQ: How do I watch videos on Facebook without Flash? A: Accessing the video through See Also |
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