RSS feeds on Facebook

I've played with a number of Facebook applications that claim to let you import RSS feeds into Facebook - and then mysteriously fail to update them. RSS feeds that don't update are not overly useful.

I finally concluded that if we wanted to import our library blogs into our (currently in demo) library Facebook page, we'd have to use Friendfeed instead. Only when I actually tried this out, it turns out that the Friendfeed application doesn't work on pages.

So I went trawling through Facebook's RSS applications again and (perhaps because this was a couple of months since I last tried) found one that seems to work: RSS-Connect(*). It looks clean, the display is reasonably customisable, and it works smoothly and intuitively to open/close items when clicked and take you through to the original item on demand. And most importantly, it really does update automatically - you even get to choose how often you want it to check for updates.

(*) There must be a way to get a link that shows you information about the app before forcing you to add it, but Facebook isn't intuitive to me and I haven't found it yet.

ETA 22/5/09 I can't recommend RSS-Connect, aka Social RSS, any more as it frequently loads either very slowly or (more often) not at all. This leaves me without a working RSS application again. Anyone know of anything, or want to create one?

ETA 17/7/09 RSS-Connect aka Social RSS is back in my good books with some caveats; see comments for more.

Non-English blog roundup #11 - the sharing edition

"Non-English" seems to have turned into French, probably mostly because that's the language I read best. Must remedy this. In any case, today I've got a collection of blog posts sharing data:

The Assessment Librarian was thinking about computer posts in his library dedicated to catalogue research only and wondered how much use these got compared to computers available for any purpose. Data collected over two weeks showed:

• Arts and Sciences branch
  • Catalogue-only - 12% usage
  • 'Open' computers - 51% usage
• Law and economy branch
  • Catalogue-only - 7% usage
  • 'Open' computers - 65% usage

He concludes that, while it's not straight-forward to analyse the results, it's worth considering whether there are other possible uses for their catalogue-only computer stations.

Inspired by this post, Des Bibliotheques 2.0:

• shares Google Analytics statistics for off-campus visits to the library catalogue from 1st April 2008 - 1 Jan 2009 (a good handful of pages in pdf);
• compares numbers of visitors to the homepage (site) vs the number of visitors to the catalogue (OPAC) (note the numbers were gathered using different tools;
• shows the impact of a new website - " the number of visitors has increased from 80-100%; the number of visits has increased from 30-50%; the number of pages seen per visit has tripled".

And De Tout Sur Rien has decided "I will no longer participate in projects in which the publication of my contributions in a digital format and under Creative Commons license [...] is not planned from the beginning," and calls for colleagues and/or readers to make the same decision.