RSS Graffiti was possibly the first application to support publishing of RSS/Atom feeds on Facebook Groups early this year. Nevertheless as our users know, unlike Fan Pages, Facebook Groups could not write on their own wall so the identity of a user was always used to publish all posts.
Well, not anymore!
RSS Graffiti 1.9.0.x Beta allows you to use the Group’s identity to publish on the Group’s wall just as you do with your Fan Pages.
Apart from a cool feature to have this feature will also have a positive impact on the known Facebook limits imposed to Facebook Users (the well known and notorious Facebook Error 341 “feed request limit exceeded”). Since you will no longer have to use your own identity to publish on your Groups, you are going to be saving on your limit, so it will also be less likely that you hit the limit.
So how do you set this up?
Piece of cake! We have a new feature we call “Publish on behalf of”. So go to RSS Graffiti App, select your Facebook Group’s tab on the left-hand column, open the feed you want to edit and click on the “More” Tab in the editor. You’ll find the “Publish on behalf of” setting there.
In the drop-down you can choose to publish on behalf of yourself, or on behalf of the Group itself. That’s it. Save the Feed and you are done. Next time the Group’s feeds are processed posts will be made using the Group’s identity (assuming you selected it in the drop-down of course).
Enjoy!
We just released the latest version of RSS Graffiti. which apart from a lot of excitement (at least to us as developers), brings on some interesting features that are quite new (and possibly still unique) in Facebook.
We’ll give you a short intro on what’s in this new version and we will follow up with a more extensive feature list and more details on specific features.
There are quite a lot of things still to improve and even more things that we want to add in the future. We are already aware of a number of small annoyances here and there and we will be working in the coming days to iron them out. But we have put a lot of hard work in this version and really couldn’t wait any longer before we shared it with you. So please keep you feedback coming. Our goal now is to do frequent small releases to fix all pending issues of this release and then move on to greater goals.
Thankful for your support,
The RSS Graffiti Team
For a long time, almost every application developer on Facebook was looking for a way to push RSS Feeds on their Facebook Application Profile Pages. We’ve been looking for ways to implement this for a long time too, but finally we have the solution built in RSS Graffiti 1.9.0 Beta.
We are so excited about it, we are writing this first blog post right after the release of RSS Graffiti 1.9.0 Beta, just to see this blog post get picked-up and posted on our wall!
“RSS Graffiti has just passed 50.000 targets!” — RSS Graffiti launched 8 months ago. Today it serves over 12.000 Facebook Profiles, over 32.000 Fan Pages and over 4.000 Facebook Groups, publishing on them stories from 85.000 feeds every 5-6 minutes!
We just released version 1.8.5 Beta of RSS Graffiti.
The focus of this version was the processing engine. What was wrong with it? It inexplicably slow.
RSS Graffiti started on September 2009 and has been working like a charm since then. Of course there are always things to improve or problems to solve. But mostly everything was smooth as far as the application itself was concerned. Until, one day, growth caught up with us. Since the beginning we had set the background processing engine to adjust its performance automatically so that all feeds are processed every 10 minutes. That seemed like a reasonable number given the circumstances.
But since RSS Graffiti has been doubling its users every month or so, at some point we realized that the processing engine could not keep up, So the 10 minute update cycle started getting bigger and bigger. On the 1st of December 2009, RSS Graffiti processing engine was running at 10 minute cycles and was processing all the 5.000 active targets (roughly 8.000 feeds) that were using the application at that time. (In RSS Graffiti terminology a “target” is the equivalent of a “wall” in Facebook).
By the end of 2009 the active targets were 7.000 and the processing cycle had climbed up to 20 minutes. This did not make much sense. We tried to adjust the various settings we had in place for that but it was obvious there was a bottleneck somewhere. Christmas holidays setback any efforts for 3 weeks and by the end of January 2010 RSS Graffiti has grown to 13.000 active targets (over 20.000 feeds). Processing cycle had climbed up to 40 minutes. 40 minutes was still much less than the usual hourly checks other similar applications do, but still it was way to far from our 10 minute goal.
We had to do something about it fast. It has been months since we were discussing improvements on the processing engine but we now had to go about them fast and figure out where the bottleneck was.
To cut a long story short, the problem was in the database server. We tried quite a few tricks for 6 days (nights actually) and we came up with a solution that was released today in version 1.8.5 Beta.
Processing cycle is now back down to 4 minutes and we know we can maintain our 10 minute performance goal without adding any new hardware until RSS Graffiti reaches roughly 50.000 active targets. After that our current hardware will run out of capacity, but don’t fear. The application is designed to run on an infinite number of servers which can simply be added to the data center and just play. We estimate that if we don’t do any further performance optimizations in the processing engine we will need a server for every 50.000 active targets.
So, for the moment this issue seems to be behind us. It’s now time to focus on more exciting things! We will first fix some pending issues that have been reported by our users in the past weeks. Then we move on to add a Facebook Tab feature to RSS Graffiti. We really have big expectations from the RSS Graffiti tab and we are eager to start working on it. But we will talk about these plans as the time comes.
We’ll keep in touch!
As we recently discovered the hard way (reading complaints of RSS Graffiti users), Facebook has changed its policy about Story Action Links to the stricter.
In short, only one custom Action Link is now allowed to be added to each story published on a wall and it can be up to 25 characters long in text. Any further Action Links submitted by applications will be ignored. This is applied immediately and is effective for all Stream Stories, new and old ones. Any previous stories published by applications will only show one Action Link, (whichever was first in the list), regardless of how many where originally included and there is no way to change that. Furthermore application developers are advised not to try to add further action links within the body or title part of stories.
We were a bit surprised to discover this change because if there was any announcement on this change we certainly must have missed it. It sure affects most Facebook applications possibly much more than it affects RSS Graffiti.
After this change, we did not have much choice left for RSS Graffiti. We had to choose between “Share” and “Full Story” as our one and only custom Action Link. And since there was already a way to direct the users to the full story by clicking on the story’s title or thumbnail, we picked “Share”. By the way we really do believe that a “Share” action link should have be added by Facebook together with the Like/Unlike action links and we really do look forward for Facebook to natively supporting this feature.
Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about the stories already posted, because we had submitted “Share” as the last Action Link, to make it more prominent. This link has now disappeared after this Facebook policy update.
Following you can find a short description of the new Action Links policy on Facebook as it appears on the developers WiKi…
We are setting up the team blog of RSS Graffiti. Adding Disqus comments and Get Satisfaction widgets.
The plan is talk about the RSS Graffiti team adventures here and share whatever other useful but relevant thing we come about while developing this application and trying to turn into something useful for everybody.
Stay tuned.