Comments on: Facebook Takes on Google Reader: Who Said RSS is Dead?

By: Facebook Resurrected The Lifestream and Killed Your Personal Blog | @NewCommBiz

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:12:07 +0000

[...] of course see this in their own Facebook stream. I noted a year and a half ago that Facebook was trying to take on RSS readers and at first the Subscribe feature seemed to enable this even more, but for individual [...]

By: tacanderson

tacanderson — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 03:33:42 +0000

Luis, you are absolutely right. I did mean Lists not groups.Thanks for pointing that out.

By: tacanderson

tacanderson — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:31:37 +0000

That's a big problem with Facebook. Many of their user features are very hard to figure out. They could themselves and their readers a huge service by A) making their setting easier to find and use and B) educating their users on how to use existing functionality.

By: Luis Antezana (luckylou)

Luis Antezana (luckylou) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:52:31 +0000

It's worth pointing out that you're using the wrong terms in your article. You talk about using Facebook *groups* to serve a similar purpose to RSS, but you should be saying Facebook *lists*. Groups and lists have an entirely different functionality, of which I am sure you're aware, but it's probably worth editing your original text to make the correction since it would be very confusing for the less familiar to try to achieve this kind of filtering with groups.

On my iPhone (I'm not sure which features are on other mobile devices), I find it quite handy that I am able access my lists to use as a filtering tool.

Facebook lists work both ways, too: you can filter down to just the sources you want to read, and you can make a list to filter out the sources you don't want to read.

By: msj904rssreader

msj904rssreader — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:41:14 +0000

Many are not using the tool all because they are not aware that you it is there. and even those that are aware do not know how to use the tool.

By: tacanderson

tacanderson — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:25:59 +0000

True, but you do need a website. Technically you don't even need an RSS feed anymore. To have a Facebook page you don't actually need either. But if you do have an RSS feed there's no cost to having a Facebook page.

You have to go where the readers are. 3 tears ago all the SEO experts were telling companies they needed a blog if they wanted to rank highly on Google. A website wasn't enough. This is the next extension of that argument, right or wrong.

By: tacanderson

tacanderson — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:25:59 +0000

By: alex kessinger

alex kessinger — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:09:57 +0000

Yes, users may not get RSS, but a websites isn't forced to have a presence in google to br read on google reader