Overfeeding
The Social Space Station apology module has now been activated. The target -those loyal subscribers to the Station RSS feed.
These people are highly-valued readers (hopefully that’s you!) may have noticed a few dispatches recently containing duplicate postings. While these duplicates did not appear on the Website they did in the feed.
The reason for this … well, it was entirely my fault actually and here’s why.
Tumblr allows authors to import their feeds from other sites to create automatic “Link” style posts. I set up the Station to automatically import my bookmarks from Ma.gnolia (an elegant social bookmarking site); not all of them mind you but those sent specifically to the Online Social Space group (hosted at Ma.gnolia).
After stuffing around a little with the site’s CSS to make the link posts look more like the standard text posts, the job was done.
So I thought …
While I multitasked in a seamingly chaotic fashion (common exam marking technique), I inadvertently turned on one of the numerous Feedburner optimization services called “Link Splicer”. This service lets users automatically splice in content from other services such as del.icio.us, Furl, Digg, and Ma.gnolia.
The service is convenient and free and I’m using heaps of others so why not turn everthing on!
And so, I setup the link splicer to add my recent Ma.gnolia bookmarks to the dispatches for inclusion in the feed. Of course, forgetting that bookmark-related-posts were now being generated on the actual Website.
So the inevitable …
Unfortunately, I didn’t click to what was going on until I started seeing duplicate notes on my Facebook profile. Because, in the spirit of sharing I had also setup Facebook to automatically import the Station RSS feed as individual notes (this is a really handy feature but surprisingly under advertised).
But to cut an uninteresting and slightly ponderous post short, I turned the link splicer off and deleted many of the duplicate notes on Facebook.
So all good but what do we know?
Sharing content between social networking services (pre-OpenSocial that is) is very efficient using the Website RSS feed as the primary distribution mechanism. The content is easy to interpret and reformat (without human intervention), it’s quick, it has initiative and is well supported by any self-respecting social networking service.
So, if you don’t have a RSS feed for your site then get one and investigate the options provided by other social networking services to integrate your content.
Caveat: Be careful of overfeeding!
