Monday, April 21, 2014

Now on Facebook

It has taken hours to set it all up and to redirect my Twitter account but it is all set up now. I now have a Facebook page to which both of my sites, my Foursquare and my Twitter account will auto-publish.
I am not now nor will I ever be an expert on Twitter nor on Facebook. The whole process was very frustrating as I had sort out all the problems with no help whatsoever other than reading some incredibly geeky help pages.

Having been through all this, I can make some recommendations to others. First - give yourself plenty of time. It took me probably about six hours off and on to decipher the unintelligible gibberish that Facebook etc call "help pages" and to try various different things to get Twitter to post not to a profile but to the page I wanted.

It seems that I have to set up a "profile" on Facebook during which they demand my "real name". Well, they're not having my real name. I refuse to be told to self-identify online. It's a privacy and safety thing. It's one thing to have a video online and no name and no address to go with it. It's quite another to have a real name available publically.

Ages ago, on a closed system, I used my real name. I suddenly had a phonecall during which I asked how they got my details. The fellow was quite helpful and it appeared he found me though standard documentation once he knew my real name. Given that villains do exist out there, I quite appreciate the German response to Facebook http://www.slashgear.com/facebook-under-real-name-fire-as-germany-insists-on-pseudonyms-18261400/ In this article, the Germans insist that psuedonyms be used for Facebook. Given that I was located solely on the basis of my real name, I have no intention whatsoever of using my real name ever, online or in print. This is purely a matter of safety - that fellow that called me could quite well have been Ted Bundy or Dennis Nilson. Fortunately he was not. After that I never used my real name online nor have any intention of so doing.

How did I get this whole thing to work? Well, my new Facebook page needs no human intervention at all. Rather, all my posts come directly via Twitter. My blog posts are picked up by "Twitterfeed.com" and are then posted directly to my Twitter account. My Foursquare account posts directly to my Twitter account. My Twitter account feeds straight into my Facebook account. No human involvement required - it's all automatic. This and the complicated instructions is why it takes so long to set up. It's enough to drive a fellow to drink!

Update: 06/17/14 - Facebook Account closed due to uselessness.

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