Facebook kills off RSS notes

One of my clients recently came to me and asked me how he could use Facebook to promote his business. Its actually relatively simple to set up a Facebook Group. The difficulty comes with what you’re going to say on Facebook.

But the content has gotta be new, relevant and interesting for your audience to stay connected.

Luckily this particular client is very good at generating interesting news posts on his website. And with WordPress being excellent at producing tailored RSS feeds*, it became obvious that we should exploit a little known feature of Facebook notes – namely RSS support for Facebook notes.

This very cool feature automatically created a new Facebook note from a new WordPress post. So without requiring any further work, you could develop and maintain a presence on Facebook, similar to what you can still do using Twitterfeed on Twitter.

Now the more observant amongst you will notice my use of the past-tense in that last paragraph. Because a few days ago, the aformentioned client emailed me asking why his Facebook notes were no longer being generated when he created a new post in WordPress.

After much head-scratching and peering into the esoteric Facebook interface, I Googled the problem I was seeing.

Now, for reasons best known to Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) it seems that Facebook have killed off this very useful feature because:

We want you to connect with your fans in the most effective ways possible

Well thanks boys, but I think we’ll be the best judge of how effective that was. But when the service is free, I guess there’s not a lot you can do about it.