Art, digital, culture and social media

Problems with Facebook revisited

Posted: 26 February 2009 | Author: | 7 Comments »

Back in November I wrote a post saying that, on its own, Facebook is no good for promoting events. Irritatingly I have an example of one of the problems I mentioned.

The next Birmingham Social Media Cafe event is tomorrow, Friday 27 February. There’s a BSMC Facebook group and now would be a good time to send out a reminder of the event to its members. However, if you try to go to that group you see:

facebook-group-unavailableWe’ve no idea why this has happened, how long it will be unavailabe or whether it’ll come back at all. There certainly hasn’t been any breach of any terms of usage. If the group is deleted permanently there’s really nothing we can do except start over again.

As I said before, Facebook’s a great tool for organising events and spreading info but (and this goes for all 3rd party website apps/services) if you’re in for the long haul then it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. In the case of the BSMC there’s a (new!) mailing list and the website to help get information about the event out.

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  1. Facebook is no good for promoting events on its own

7 Comments on “Problems with Facebook revisited”

  1. 1 Barnard said at 8:30 pm on February 26th, 2009:

    The Facebook group is working now
    It could have been closed for maintenance
    Barnard

  2. 2 Graham said at 9:26 am on February 27th, 2009:

    Hi,

    How long was your Facebook group unavailable for? The comment saying it’s back up was posted on the same day as your original post…

    Many thanks,

    Graham

  3. 3 Chris Unitt said at 7:54 pm on March 1st, 2009:

    The group was down for about 24 hours. Glad it’s back but it was down at a pretty bad time and we’re none the wiser as to why it happened. Apparently other disgruntled types have had the same happen to them recently too.

  4. 4 Rob said at 6:41 pm on May 30th, 2009:

    And facebook ignores any inquiries as to why. I think that is absolutely irresponsible and disrespectful.

    No explanations offered, even when asked.

  5. 5 Rob said at 6:44 pm on May 30th, 2009:

    If you are seeing a message that your group or event is unavailable right now, this is a temporary result of site maintenance, and is not related to the content of your group or event. Please try accessing it in a few hours, when it should be available again with all content restored.

  6. 6 Aashish Niroula said at 9:16 am on June 3rd, 2009:

    Thanks to all..I am so relieved. I too had the same problem.

  7. 7 Zoe Hinamori said at 4:59 am on August 6th, 2009:

    Thanks for the info….
    I am afraid that my group will be lost 4ever :(

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