Bad news for all Facebook users; company has changed its ‘Notes’ settings. Going further, users can’t import blog items via RSS feed to their personal Facebook pages. Company is implementing new changes to attract more users, but – in my view – removing old features from Facebook will directly influence its market potential. Last month Facebook had omitted “Discussion” and “Review” tabs from the ‘Pages’ which had created aggression in people’s mind and many of them have deleted their account. However, such initiative by Facebook has provided an opportunity for various third party app development companies like Grow Plan – an alternative of discussion and review tab. Apparently, Facebook is doing such changes in order to increase its revenue and market capitalization as its IPO is expected to hit the floor by mid 2012. Therefore, increase in revenue might help company to attract market investors. Also, we might see some alternative for RSS feed for notes as a third-party initiative in future.
However, RSS is not completely dead on Facebook. Company is still allowing users to subscribe to page updates via RSS. This means that Facebook has shut down its RSS feeds only for blogs.
“The fact of the matter remains that RSS is not a consumer-friendly technology. If I said ‘RSS’ to my mother, she would have absolutely no idea what I was talking about. If I said “Twitter” or “Facebook” to her, she knows who those are — she even uses them. That said, RSS does still often provide at least a partial backbone for those services she does know,” as said by MG Siegler, General partner at Crunch Fund and a columnist for Tech Crunch.
Currently, dependency on RSS feed has decreased drastically, except in some countries where social networking sites are banned like few of the Gulf-Countries. In those countries RSS feed acts as the main source of subscription. With the introduction of “Like” and “Unlike” button, popularity of RSS feed has decreased. Now people use to share their comments directly on their pages of social media networking sites.
“The best way to get people to interact with your content is to give them insight into the links you share on your Wall by adding personal comments and responding to feedback from fans.” according to Facebook help page.
Hope this removal might not blow up the criticism further against the latest changes done by Facebook. However, we expect many more changes to come in recent future by Facebook, especially when Google+ Page has challenged Facebook’s business segment.
Is your blog feeding Facebook through RSS ? if yes, after such removal are you noticing any impact on your blog traffic. Do share with us in comment section.
facebook has done terrible things before but this is the worst. bring the RSS feed back!