Tech Blog

[#1]

In the early days of the web, there was a nasty practice of creating frames to link content and make it appear as if it was on your page, when it really was located somewhere else.

Now, a decade later, Facebook is doing the same thing.  Framing out your content with URLs unique to Facebook, and stealing the comments off your blog and moving the conversation from your posts to Facebook.

The next time you click on a link someone shares on Facebook, look at the URL in the status bar and at the floating frame at the top of the page.



The URL directs to a Facebook alphanumeric string. Even if the person bookmarks the page to return to it later, the Facebook icon appears in the bookmark and the framed out content will appear when they return.  Even as they navigate about your page, the Facebook URL stays at the top.  They have effectively framed out yourcontent, just like the weasels used to do in the early days of the web.

Along with the framing out of your brand, the addition of a Facebook commentbutton to the frame, so prominently displayed, will siphon off the comments and put them on the  news feed, not in your article.

This creates a number of problems, chief of which is taking the conversation away from the originally published piece.  Many will agree that the comments AFTER a post create just as much value as the post itself, especially when there are questions asked in the post for user feedback.

If you do a post about great weight loss tips, you may offer 3 or 4, but the comments can go on forever to continue the conversation.  When the comments get tossed on the Facebook wall, they're not linked up in Google.  Someone stumbling for weight loss tips can find your blog entry, and the comments posted to your site, but the comments on your Facebook wall will be lost forever. The conversation disappears.

So if you're linking up your blog posts to share on Facebook walls to drive traffic and get as many people involved as you can, you need to drop in a bit of code to break those Facebook frames and keep the URL to appear as if the user is on your site (because they are) and get that comment button out of view so they comment on your post, where it's the most valuable.

It's a simple FrameBuster that you drop in to the header of any page you want to bust a frame on.

<script TYPE="text/javascript">if(top.location!= document.location)top.location = document.location;</script>

It will also keep the Diggbar off your site, should you ever create anything so wonderful as to be dugg.

catch the buzz ... pass it on.

Message Edited by buzzbishop on 06-28-2009 08:45 PM

Message Edited by ElizabethS on 09-10-2009 07:44 PM