August 9th, 2007
Can't I swap Twitter for FaceBook's status box? (and other FaceBook questions)
OK, now that I’m diving deeper into FaceBook, I’m playing with the status box in the top right hand corner (mine is pictured left) and it’s quite obvious that this does pretty much the same thing that Twitter does. So, the next obvious question is, can’t I just substitute one for the other? For example, can’t I have a Twitter plug-in for FaceBook that does two things:
- Simultaneously update my Twitter feed and my FaceBook status with whatever I enter into my FaceBook status box
- Simultaneously update my Twitter feed and my FaceBook status with whatever I enter into Twitter (should I choose to use that interface instead.
Judging by the feedback to Twitter’s own plug-in for FaceBook, I’m clearly not alone in wanting this ability. After all, why would I want to feed these sort of up-to-the minute updates about my activities into two interfaces (or why should I force people who want to follow those updates into picking FaceBook or Twitter to tune into?)? The point is sort of driven home by Sandy McMurray who earlier this year Twittered:
Updating my status on Facebook, then rushing back here to do the same.
There are some third party PHP-approaches to the problem, developed by people wanting to scratch this same itch. But, in this day and age of mashups, it seems like this is the sort of thing that could easily be built right into Twitter and FaceBook. Or, here’s a request for Steve Repetti over at Zude: maybe you can prove to us the power of Zude by interfacing the two within a Zudescape. After all, wouldn’t that demonstrate the drag and drop capability of Zude along with using Zude’s Open5G programming language to get to Zude components (in this case Twitter and FaceBook) talking to each other?
OK, enough about Status boxes. I’ve got a some other bitchin’ to do about FaceBook:
- Today, to generate the screen shot that appears in my most previous blog entry, I deleted a connection to a friend and asked him to re-invite me. I kept watching my FaceBook inbox for the invitation to show up but it never did. Then he said “Did you check your e-mail?” Sure enough, there was the invite. Shouldn’t such invitations show up in the FaceBook inbox as well.
- Pursuant to the deletion I did in #1, my friend commented that he received no notification that he had been deleted from my network. Seems like that might be a good idea.
- When a connection is made, FaceBook assumes that that person is now my “friend.” FaceBook’s story feed (”stories” can be auto-generated Twitter-like vignettes) has an entry like “David and Stephen O’Grady are now friends.” In this case, that’s true. I’d like to think of Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady as a friend. But some of the other people that connected to me in the last day or two are not really my friends. At least not yet. They’re business associates.
- Going back to my previous blog, FaceBook seems to operate in the past tense. When I made a connection with Matt Conner here at CNET Networks, I ended up telling FaceBook that we “Worked together.” But that’s not the case. We work together.
- When I tested Twitter’s plug in for FaceBook, I was dismayed to see that, when it requests your Twitter credentials (ID and password), the password isn’t masked. That can be pretty embarrassing if someone is looking over your shoulder and you’re a fast typist. Thinking it would be masked, I zipped my password off the keyboard into the password field and there it was for my co-workers to see. Fortunately, no one was looking. Speaking of which, where does that data go? Something tells me that somewhere (either in transit or in one of its resting places along the way), that password isn’t being encrypted (and is therefore vulnerable).
