It's not our fault! Well, not always.
Storified by Bo Hee Kim · Fri, Sep 28 2012 12:11:25
Is the Storify Bookmarklet or Chrome Extension not working on Facebook?
We heard this morning that the Bookmarklet and Chrome Extension, particularly on Facebook.
Trying to @storify FB post using Chrome. ... and Firefox... some students get it to work. Others can't. Sup?
Ryan is teaches journalism at UNC and had his students sign up for Storify and download these tools onto their browsers. When they went to test them out, the results were all over the place.
#uncjomc class cross-platform/browser tested @Storify buttons on #fb . The (seemingly random) results: http://instagram.com/p/QHyryTPp0O/
Ryan shot me an e-mail to discuss the issue. He wanted to know how exactly our tools worked on Facebook. We've never done a blog post explaining it, mostly because we didn't think anyone was interested to know. We try to keep things transparent at Storify, so I was happy to oblige.
Writing up a blogpost about how the @Storify Chrome Extension and Bookmarklet work on Facebook. I'll show it off at demo day. cc @rtburg
What's going on?
The Chrome Extension and Bookmarklet scrape the Facebook page you're on (it doesn't use the API). That means that if Facebook changes their code, we usually need to tweak our tools to make them work. For example, last week Facebook changed one of its class names and our users told us the Bookmarklet stopped working on the site altogether.
So to wrap it up ...
It's not always our fault when the tools stop working on Facebook. If you're encountering errors, please let us know! We're happy to take a look and squash the bugs.What else should you know?
Also learned (I think) when you @storify #fb post, it becomes permanently public. Even if later deleted or restricted. Makes sense. Confirm?
Confirmed. When you Storify a post from Facebook, we bring in that raw data. That means that if the post ever is deleted or edited, your story will still have the original thing that you found newsworthy. Actually, we do the same thing with Tweets as well.
Got other questions? E-mail info@storify.com and maybe we'll blog about it next!
