If you are one of the few who actually regularly read my Todd Bradley’s Galaxy blog, you may think that after my trip to see the night time space shuttle launch I promptly died. Well, that’s not true. It’s just that I haven’t been in a very wordy mood, I guess. What little blog style writing I’ve been doing got taken over by Facebook.
There’s pros and cons to Facebook, and I’ve been fighting over them in my mind.
On the plus side, way more of my real friends and family read my status updates on Facebook than have ever read my blog. Most people don’t use a news reader and have no idea what RSS is, but Facebook makes it simple because they can get all that sort of social information in once place.
On the minus side, everyone I write on Facebook belongs to the Facebook corporation. They can do whatever they want with it, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I sort of like to retain the copyright to the few interesting things I write online. Plus, Facebook just isn’t suited for long articles. Check out the blog post I wrote before this one about my trip to Florida to see the shuttle. Facebook just doesn’t seem well designed for handling that sort of post. Twitter seems to be for sharing thoughts that are about 3 words in length, Facebook seems to be for sharing thoughts that are about 30 words in length, and blogs seem to be for sharing thoughts that are about 300 to 3000 words in length. (Anything longer than that and you should just write a magazine article or a book)
So I just upgraded WordPress to 3.0.1 and installed a plugin that will update my Facebook status whenever I post a new blog article. That way, if I want to write something longer than comfortably fits in Facebook’s little box, I have my outlet and all my Facebook friends will hear about it at the same time. Those that care can go read the whole thing, and those that don’t can just skip it like they would have done anyhow.
I’ll try this approach for a while and see how it goes. Leave a comment with any thoughts you have on the topic.
I miss your articles too. Maybe you were tired of writing blog posts—I get that way sometimes. You can do FB when you feel short-tempered and blog posts when you feel philosophical; then we’ll all be happy.
If you wanted, you could use an app like Networked Blogs to pull your blog posts into Facebook. That way, you can share your longer thoughts here, but still get them in front of the folks you connect with on FB.
Actually, I already solved the problem with a similar approach. There’s a WordPress plugin called Wordbooker that will crosspost your WordPress posts to Facebook. It’s very configurable, but I’m just using the default settings and it seems to do what I wanted.