Wordbooker Posts cannot be featured in Facebook with Timeline

Grouping happens with anything – posts made through Twitter will be grouped together and making posts “featured” is not something that can be done through the API unless Facebook have changed something.

It’s actually possible. I just posted from Seesmic into Facebook and it allowed me to feature it. Let me know if you want to talk to the Seesmic CTO…

You can mark any post as “featured” once its on your wall – you just can’t do it programmatically through the API as the “featured” flag is an end user option not a posting problem.

Steve,

We are not talking about the same thing. Let me try to explain more clearly. I am not looking for Wordbooker to automatically feature a post. I am more than happy to manually click on the “Feature” option.

The issue is as follows:
* When I post directly on my wall, that post gets its own window that can be featured.
* When I post through Seesmic on my wall, that post gets its own window that can be featured.

However, when I post through Wordbooker, all the Wordbooker posts go in a Wordbooker box instead of getting their own independent window in Timeline and that box cannot be featured.

If I post to a regular fan page, it still has the proper behavior of looking like a traditional wall post, but in timeline it really does not work.

Given that Seesmic is seemingly making its posts look like traditional wall posts I suspect there is a way Wordbooker can do the same.

Let me know if you want screenshots of what I am describing to make it clearer.

The whole grouping thing is odd – I get it with Twitter and various other apps in my news feed. Does Seesmic show that its posting as Seesmic or is it doing it some other way (i.e. not using a registered FB app). If its a mobile app it might be simply posting through the web interface as you rather than posting as an app.

Here is his reply:

To answer your question, we post as a regular registered app to Facebook, using the API.

Facebook uses some advanced (and undisclosed, as far as I know) algorithms to determine the “importance” of updates, both on a user’s timeline as well as in your friends’ news feeds. They take things into account like popularity of the app, posting frequency, how many users report such posts from an app as spam etc. This also might influence whether FB groups updates from an app in a box, or displays them individually.

On my own timeline, Foursquare posts a grouped like this, but when I hover the box, there’s an edit button at the top right, where I can select “View as individual stories” – so maybe you can “train” FB to not do the boxing for Wordbooker on your timeline at least?

Hope this helps!

So you need to ungroup it on your timeline

Ugh, this is really quite frustrating. You can’t simply ‘ungroup’ the wordbooker posts on the timeline – that’s the whole problem.

For example, we posted 8 posts to our FB page via Wordbooker between 2/3 and 2/28. When I preview our page in the timeline format, all the posts for that period show up in ONE box on our timeline, that looks something like this:

City of Bonney Lake
February 3, 2012 – February 27, 2012 via Wordbooker
|City Council Meeting Tonight
The Bonney Lake City Council meets tonight for its regular …
|Native Plant Salvage this Sunday
The Native Plant Salvage Alliance is coordinating a …
6 more ^

To see the other 6 posts, you have to actually scroll down in this tiny box. Also, you only see 1-2 lines of the Wordbooker post text, whereas before a much larger amount of text was previewed.

As for viewing individual stories: Up at the top of the Wordbooker box, you can click the edit icon and select ‘View Individual Stories’. Sounds great, but all this does is open a new page that lists all the Wordbooker posts. And at least for me, every post on this list is a single line stating that I posted something via Wordbooker, without the title or content of that post (so helpful!). The ‘view individual stories’ list looks something like this:

Yesterday
10:52 am City of Bonney Lake posted something via Wordbooker.

To figure out which post is which I have to check the timestamp or click each link individually to view the post.

The only workaround I can find to the timeline clumping is this: From the full list of stories, click the icon at the right side of the listed item and select ‘Highlighted on page’. This makes the post a ‘highlight’ that appears at the top of your page and goes across the full screen of the timeline.

So the only way I can figure to separate all WordPress posts would be to highlight every single post, which it looks like I’d have to do one at a time. Did I say ugh yet?

I love change!

The posting something via Wordbooker shouldn’t be happening any more because I’ve killed the open graph actions for Wordbooker. Timeline is a complete mess when it comes to things being posted by applications – oddly enough on Pages the new timeline layout seems to put Wordbooker posts in separate boxes.

The big question is – what does it look like when you are seeing other peoples posts made via Wordbooker or when they are viewing your posts in their Newsfeed… .dont forget Timeline!=Newsfeed.

I’m getting the same thing. Wordbooker is posting to the normal page just fine, but when I “preview” the timeline for pages I had to scroll all the way back to september to find a post. Considering the switch to timeline for pages will come March 30, by then I’d prefer wordbooker posts to show up at the timeline. I understand they go to peoples newsfeeds however I only use wordbooker to post to my page and only use normal posts sparingly. So when timeline is previewed, it looks as if the page is never updated or at least not on a regular basis. Thanks for all you do.

In the “activity log” I did find the recent posts, if i change their status from visible to highlighted, then they appear… looks like some other apps are working on the same issue…

I found this link helpful: https://help.networkedblogs.com/entries/20798311-posts-on-the-new-facebook-timeline

Try using the “post as link” post type…..

Can you do a screen shot of the grouping – I don’t see it on the Wordbooker Page when I run timeline on it.

“post as link” fixed the problem, now new posts are at the top of the timeline. Thanks!

Yeah! “Post as link” does make each post appear individually and at the top of the timeline. But I have one more question – is there a way to have more of the blog post text to appear when posting as a link? All that shows up is the title and the first two words of the post … in the past we were sending WordPress posts as FB posts so you could actually read the text of the blog posts on the FB wall. Now it’s just a title & 1-2 word snippet. Maybe we’ll have to make our titles punchier?

(By the way, I realized I had not upgraded Wordbooker to the current version, so just did that and it does make a difference! Sorry for my rant previously. I also sent a request via the FB issues page asking them to change the timeline setup to allow apps to post updates individually instead of grouped.)