I think the designers of Facebook are having a good old laugh at everyone’s expense with their pages dysfunctionality.

Seriously — it shouldn’t be so incredibly difficult to set things up!

Here’s my objective:

First, Set up a “fan” page for two blogs: daisydonnie and smell of love.

Second, set the wall up so it will be able to receive posts from either an RSS feed from the blog itself, or feedburner.

Now this is not incredibly difficult to do on a personal profile. I can do it in a number of ways, using ping.fm (not brilliant, but it works), or with a share button on the blog itself (I use Add to any which is easy to configure and use). The former can be set to post automatically to a number of different sites whenever you save a new post, and the latter is manual – you select the right place to post, log in and it’s done.

But these — as I say — only work properly on personal profiles. They don’t work on pages.

And believe me, I’ve tried to get this working, using each of the RSS feed applications in turn; I tried wordbook, a wordpress plugin (which it turned out only worked on personal profiles), and even ping. Which might work, but I need something a bit better.

See, the ultimate issue is that Facebook needs pages to be linked to profiles. I presume this is some way of ensuring they are for real things and not for spammers. What results is somethng that’s neither fish-nor-fowl (as my old boss Mike West put it). It’s not quite a profile for a business or site while having nearly enough functionality to make it useable.

In short, the system is in need (IMHO) of an overhaul. Because it really only works like Facebook 1.0: you can post to the page and that’s about it.

Now, for a multi-million (or more) business, I think (and again, My opinion here) that this is a bit on the backward side. I’d hope they’d have fully modularised their code and databases so it’s at least feasible to use the same functionality for both.

But at this stage, it really doesn’t appear that way. What it looks like is the “Page” in Facebook contains a proportion of the functionality that a “Profile” has. And this just seems daft in the extreme.

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised; this is the company that ignored something like 90% of its own users when they changed their UI to something that resembles Twitter.

There is, of course, a workaround for all this: create a profile page — in contravention of their usage policy — and take the risk that they’ll take it down.

Interesting article about Facebook.

I find Facebook interesting yet boring. It seems to restrict your interaction with others rather than making it easier.

Maybe it’s cos I’m GenX rather than GenY…