Publicize to Facebook: Change App Attribution away from WordPress.com!

Just did a quick search for jetpack “published an article on WordPress which brought me to this forum where I then searched on “publicize facebook” and discovered numerous threads on this topic. Like so many others have stated in multiple posts elsewhere and threads here, I want to change the Jetpack “published an article on WordPress” representation and link in the title that gets posted to Facebook.

First off, I’m a huge fan of Publicize and it is used on most of the nearly 300 sites we’ve built on WordPress over the last several years. It’s made life so much easier for clients (and me) and you’ve truly built a fabulous seamless integration with multiple social media sites.

All that said, the guy responding to these Jetpack support forum queries (Jeremy Herve) responded by describing the limitations in App Attribution in this post about the same topic. The guy that started that thread, Richard Foley, stated “I did NOT publish any article on WordPress.com.” and “Neither is there any need for this (linking to WordPress.com) since other social media plugin sharers (like blog2social and SNAP), manage to post to Facebook with the blog user name (as would be expected), and JetPack posts to Twitter just fine.”

I concur with Richard and all the other people who have started similar threads in this forum who have asked for the same thing. So this makes me think that:

a) The Jetpack plugin could publish to Facebook and have something like this as the default string as App Attribution for the plugin: “Steve Borsch published an article using WordPress” and have the WP link go to www.ads-software.com instead of .com which would be more acceptable to those of us who self-host (Note: You could have a WordPress.com published article use the .com link and a self-hosted publish link to .org). Having it go to .com is just confusing.

What would be best is to link to the originating site’s post OR, at the very least, a landing page that would have a nice UI link to the .org, .com and Automattic sites. Linking to WordPress.com virtually guarantees a user clicking on the link, and ending up at WordPress.com, would wonder “What the…? Where is the original article!?!”

Also, why are their two links to WordPress in the output?

b) In Foley’s post Jeremy Herve recommended that self-hosted users use a tool like SNAP to build their own app to be able to customize this sort of output. Sorry Jeremy…expecting non-developers (or developer’s clients) to use a tool like SNAP is like recommending they use a bazooka to kill an ant.

c) Bonus Suggestion: In the Facebook excerpt, the Jetpack Publicize does place a link to the actual article, but that link should be preceded by something like, “READ MORE:” to make it a lot more obvious.