Facebook Shared Items now in Tumble Log. It was harder than it should've been!
5 January 2008
Filed under Internet, Social Networking, Technology
As a point of notification, I’ve now started to include my Facebook Shared Items in my Tumble Log (how’s that for openness!). While it’s technically true that I can export all of my shared items from Facebook via a handy RSS feed, it’s not nearly that cut & dry.
I treat Facebook Shared Items as a sort of social bookmarking service. I have a bookmarklet in my browser’s toolbar and when I run across a site I enjoy, I stab it, enter any thoughts of my own and click submit. Facebook tries to extract an image from the page as a thumbnail, posts it where all my friends can see the link, a bit of the page’s content, the thumbnail, my commentary, and even a movie player if the link is to a popular video sharing site (think Youtube).
This is great and fancy, but I would also link that information (sans video player and thumbnail) to appear in my tumble log here on the site. Sounds simple, right? They have an RSS feed of these items, and Google Reader does more or less the same thing, except much more lo-fi (I don’t get to add my commentary, for example).
My system, as I’ve written about it before, deals exclusively with RSS feeds from various systems. Twitter, Last.FM, Google Reader, et cetera. All have fairly appropriate RSS feeds. The link to the item is in the link element. The description is a text or HTML description.
In the case of the Facebook shared items feed, however, it’s not right. Not right at all. The link element contains a link back to Facebook where I posted the item. Google Reader gets this right and links to the item I’m sharing. So where is the link to the item in question? Inside an <a> tag within the summary element. The actual summary is inside a paragraph tag (albeit with the class, ‘summary’) within the summary. There’s a whole jumbled mess of meta data stuffed in there for no good reason. The fact that I had to bust out BeautifulSoup to get at all the meta data that ReallySimpleSyndication was designed to deliver um… simply… is proof enough that Facebook isn’t doing this right.
