PBS on Facebook

Michael Mace michaelcmace@gmail.com
Sun, 31 Jul 2011 15:49:57 PDT
Ahhh, what an interesting conversation about Facebook.  The pluses and
minuses people have expressed mirror everything I think about that site.  So
although it sounds a bit weird, I agree with everything everyone said,
including the disagreements.
	
Anyway, here's what we did about it.

The current (empty) PBS page was apparently generated automatically by
Facebook because some users on Facebook used the phrase or tag "Pacific Bulb
Society."  Auto-generated pages on Facebook are populated with whatever has
been written about that subject on Wikipedia.  Since we had no entry about
PBS on Wikipedia, there was no content for Facebook to scrape.  Thus the
empty page.

So, we just put a very short article on Wikipedia about the PBS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Bulb_Society/

Hopefully, sometime in the next few days that will be auto-scraped by
Facebook and we'll have a short article about PBS on Facebook, without us
having to actually do anything.

This is not a substitute for using Facebook to actively promote PBS, which
might be intensely cool but would require a volunteer offering to step up
and do it, including maintaining it over time (there's nothing worse on
Facebook than starting something grand and then letting it wither).

Right now the PBS web volunteers don't have the bandwidth to do this, so the
next best thing is the Wikipedia article.  That's easy to maintain.

Mike
San Jose, CA


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