New Facebook Bugs Likely to End Usefulness in Travel Biz
Published 11/16/2011
(Portland, Oregon) – The newest set of bugs in yet another puzzling round of changes at Facebook social media pages will likely take a chunk out of its usefulness in the travel industry, as well as many other sectors.
Among the newest and cryptic changes that have frustrated many is the new interface for the “create a photo album” feature. Normally, this feature lets you load numerous photos at once to become part of an album – instead of simply posting one photo – and it lets you insert text in these. The old interface would then actually post to your page, and preview these on your page in a series of three thumbnails (another recent change switched that from four to three thumbnails). This latest interface is full of bugs, crashes often when you try to enter text to describe the photos, and then when you hit “post” it does not post it to your page. The photo album sits in obscurity amidst your list of photo albums, which in itself is now awkward and difficult to find, thanks to a change a few months back.
This change presents a great hurdle for travel businesses that rely on such a feature to promote their area via photographs – which are intensely popular among users. There is now no way to present these photos in an efficient or decently elegant way, except to drop the url of the photo album into your Facebook page, but then it only will display one photo and not a thumbnail of a few.
This will also cause great difficulty for any business that promotes its products using photographs.
To add insult to injury, the new interface for loading photographs into an album actually has a “feedback” link, but when you are finished filling out the form and you hit the submit button, this feature crashes.
All this, and a change in how the social media displays an advertiser's important financial information, will cause serious problems, according to Andre' Hagestedt, editor of OregonTravelDaily.com's parent publication, Oregon Coast Beach Connection.
“They actually hid my ad info, so that it took me 20 minutes to find it,” Hagestedt said. “I only found it by going to the help section, but you shouldn't have to go to help to find where your critical information is, like how much money you were bidding on ads. That's probably not even ethical.”
Repeated requests to Facebook for an interview or comment went unanswered. In fact, there did not appear to be a page on the social media site where you could find a media representative, and this left only contact through the help feature.
Hagestedt said he'd left around 20 help requests on the new interface with Facebook but none of those were answered.
Hagestedt said he'd received numerous complaints from Facebook followers about a similar problem, but not everyone seemed to be hit with the new interface.
“Strangely, not all of our Facebook pages had this,” Hagestedt said. “I don't know if this is a beta test they prematurely threw out there or if it's a slow migration. Either way, they're not telling us.”
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