Beware of Facebook update times
Have you ever been accused of being on Facebook when you were not? In a meeting, unable to take a call, and when you call them back explaining why the other person says… “But you were on Facebook!” even though you know you were not. This has happened to me on more than one occasion. The times of my Facebook activity never reflects the real times of my actual activity online. Here’s why…
It’s all about the way you aggregate your activity on other social networks in facebook. The MXit Evo blog post, that got its first comment at 4.24pm yesterday, was picked up by feedburner (The RSS management service) a few minutes after it was actually published.
This blogs RSS feed is then aggregated by Friendfeed which then is fed into my facebook notes via RSS along with the RSS feed of all the other social networking sites I use that have RSS feed (almost all of them).
So…
- You are active on a social network
- That activity is aggregated by Friendfeed (after a time delay of up to one hour)
- The friendfeed RSS is then imported into my Facebook notes after yet another time delay (anywhere up to 6 hours)
- Facebook then shows that you are active on their site at a time many hours after your were actually active on the original site.
- Your Facebook friends think you are on Facebook when you are actually not.
Next time your Facebook friends say “but your were on Facebook!” when your know you were not you can explain how the feed aggregation/import notes via RSS process works on Facebook and the resulting time delay.
Has this ever happened to you?