Facebook Blogging Tips Application Misses the Point
4 Comments Published by Rodney Rumford July 11th, 2007 in Facebook Applications, Facebook Review, facebook widgets.
Rating: 
I have been a serious business blogger for several years and was excited to see the blogging tips application. Well, i was disappointed rather quickly. The blogging tips application allows you to display a daily blogging tip on your profile page that is selected from the editors of the application.
“Every day, the blogging experts at Blog Business Summit will select a great tip and serve it up on the profiles of everyone using the BlogTips application.” Ok, but this is very short sighted. Why not let everyone contribute and everyone see all the contributions? That is the point of social networks, sharing in ways that the USER feels compelled to share.
The application allows you (or any visitor to your profile page) to submit a blogging tip, nice and simple. And that’s about all it does. It takes up way too much real estate versus value. (this could explain the less than 65 users in it’s 2 days online). This application is a real estate hog on your profile page and nearly half of the application is advertising. ugggh. This application has 4 links to promote their blog summit, this is way too heavy handed of a marketing pitch; 1 would suffice.
Applications that are so heavy handed and stifle meaningful sharing will not likely spread or gain wide adoption. The reasons are simple. If I add a blogging tip it does show up in my mini-feed which is nice. However, no one can see my tip that i submitted in the application (except me). This application does not allow me to share my tips in a list format, or allow me to see my friends tips in a central location. It does not allow me to connect with any of my friends and see their tips.
Quote from the developers: “Our goal here was to develop a simple application, so we didn’t spend a lot of time on a canvass page where people could submit their tips”. Guess they are missing the point, most users want more advanced functionality and not a 1 dimensional application. I should be able to display & share “MY TIPS” or my friends tips and share those in a variety of ways.
I suggest that they add some meaningful functionality to this facebook blogging tips application fast. You can get the app here.
My latest blogging tip in my Mini-Feed
The Facebook Blgging Tips Application is a Real Estate Hog
Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook blog, blogging tips, blog summit, blog marketing
Alas, I have to agree with you that our application doesn’t do most of the things we’d like it to yet. When we first conceived of it, nearly all the features you suggest here were in the original plan. But we had to scale way back once we got a sense of the time requirements. We’re only a six-person firm and we’re juggling planning a massive conference and many consulting projects. Our development team is already stretched thin. But we knew that this was a necessary first step into the Facebook Platform realm.
We’ll be adding some more meaningful functionality in the next round of development for this plugin. Your post will definitely be a big topic of discussion. I can’t promise that it will happen as fast as you’d probably like. We’re really mega-swamped.
One final point: to be fair about the real-estate hogness, the yellow portion of the application display is only available to the user him or herself, not to the people viewing their profiles.
And in the interests of transparency, I will be doing a blog post later this week — and every week until we get this application more fully developed — listing each of the tips we selected.
I swear to God we’re not trying to be command and control, we’re just busy, busy little beavers with too much wood to chew.
Won’t accept criticism? Too bad. Not telling anyone about this blog or ever coming back.
Maybe you can do a post about the top 5 features a faceapp should have? Or the top 5 objectives to be met – maybe even best practices? The level above developers seem to be reading your blog, not to mention Facebook execs. Or I could shut up and just hire you to advise me… hm…
Seriously though, I’d link to that.
Just an update on the app: we’ve now added a new canvas page that displays past tips and allows people to submit a tip from a location other than their profile.