Elder Game: Twitter Updates
Twitter Account: I’ve started tweeting each day about the development process on twitter @GorgonMMO. Mostly I post minutia and useless factoids, but if you’re reading Twitter anyway, you could do worse.
Facebook Sucks: (warning: non-MMO-related rant below!) By the way, I’ll probably never do much with the Facebook page, due to how Facebook now charges to make sure posts get seen by my followers. If I don’t pay, only a fraction of followers get the news!
The way they presented this is pretty skeezy, too. They call it “promoting” a post, and say that all I’m doing is paying to get my news to the top of your news feed so it doesn’t get missed. This is only kinda-sorta true.
They actually removed your ability to see your unfiltered newsfeed a while ago. Now you can only see your newsfeed as filtered through EdgeRank, their algorithm for sorting news. If a news post has a low EdgeRank for you, it doesn’t show up in your news feed at all. They make it sound like those posts just get sorted to the bottom of your feed, but actually they take it out of your news feed entirely.
A post’s EdgeRank score is highest right after it’s posted, and then it degrades rapidly after that. So if you happen to view your news feed right after I post, you’ll see it. If you wait too long, my news will get cold and it’ll fall out of your news feed entirely. Unless I pay to keep the EdgeRank high.
This is starting to cause a lot of outrage among business owners, and Facebook’s reaction to their complaints is very frustrating. They say they’re just trying to keep users’ news feeds from being too crowded. But their “fix” is to prioritize the people with big advertising budgets. I’m positive that’s not how any sane person would prefer to have their newsfeed sorted.
My RSS reader has thousands of posts in it, but I’ve never gotten overwhelmed. That’s because it’s not all one single news feed! Why can’t Facebook show me a list, saying “You have 16 news messages from friends, 5 from game pages, 10 from celebrities, 8 from…” and then let me click the feed I want to see first? They made this problem by having a crappy interface, and now they’re “fixing” it by charging me money. Yay.
Anyway, since Twitter and RSS are free, and I don’t yet have a big Facebook following anyway, Facebook can go to hell. I’m not going to spend my time building an audience there and then have to pay to talk to that audience.
I’ll still post big announcements on Facebook, because some coverage is better than none… but I won’t bother with posting the smaller stuff.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention the Twitter account. I’ll have a more substantial blog post soon!