Comments on: Thoughts on Facebook, Linked Data and Other Developments

By: Jenny Mitcham

Jenny Mitcham — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 09:10:19 +0000

Another really interesting blog post Brian – keep up the good work. We have a (fairly small!) Facebook presence at the moment but I could see it might be useful to use Facebook Questions to get user feedback in the future. We just need a few more fans first!

By: stuart brown

stuart brown — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:16:10 +0000

Re the ‘is Facebook killing company websites’ section, I think ‘no’ is the simple answer, but it may well change them.

I’m looking at doing a radical overhaul of the OU’s fanpage and it seems that now that FBML is being replaced by iframe that in fact new websites may need to be developed that will work well as iframes within Facebook. Obviously it’s not particularly viable to develop a whole new set of sites exclusively for use within FB (or perhaps primarily rather than exclusively) so i can see that FB requirements may play a larger role when putting functional spec together for new site builds.

We are also doing proof of concept work on building HTML5 app sites that can be used (via app wrappers) on a variety of mobile platforms so we don’t incur costs of development and maintenance on a number of code bases for a number of platforms. Again it’s worth thinking whether it is better to plan these kinds of developments into the build of the ‘desktop’ website rather than build anew. Obviously you can’t plan for all eventualities but we’re certainly going to need to be finding ways to keep the costs down!

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:34:13 +0000

It looks to me like Facebook Questions hasn’t been rolled out to mobile web yet – can anyone confirm or refute that?

I think mobile web is still also waiting for Facebook Places, which I’d've thought would be a priority, given the number of phones which are shipped with a bookmark rather than a facebook app.

By: Frankie Roberto

Frankie Roberto — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:58:22 +0000

PS the following Facebook graph request will do a search for ‘places’ with the words ‘Cambridge’ and ‘University’ that are within 1000 meters of 52.205278,0.117222 (which is the lat/long that Wikipedia lists).

The first result is http://www.facebook.com/pages/University-Of-Cambridge/131107916937221 – which has 1,348 check-ins

There are also numerous other places for individual colleges and faculties.

By: Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)

Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:49:45 +0000

Thanks Frankie. You have made me realise that such unexpected findings may be due to technical difficulties rather than a lack of use.

By: Frankie Roberto

Frankie Roberto — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:46:30 +0000

The University of Cambridge probably doesn’t have any checkins yet because the ‘University of Cambridge’ PLACE on Facebook hasn’t yet been merged with the ‘University of Cambridge’ PAGE. To do this requires the owner of the page to ‘claim’ the place, and then request that they are merged (which is a bit of a faff).

This is one of Facebook’s biggest problems with the graph at the moment – there are lots of unreconciled duplicates (especially as because they also imported Wikipedia at one point as ‘Community Pages’, which often double-up with official ones). I’m sure they’ll get round to figuring out a decent process for managing this though. This kind of stuff is hard.

Frankie