How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love Timeline

Elementary school-age social media can sure be mean. Over the last couple of weeks I've had trouble posting Episconixonian items to my Facebook page. This evening I learned I wasn't alone. Lots of Google Blog users were complaining.

Someone posting on Google's user forum sent me here. Shoot, all I've got to do, advises Facebook, is turn my blog into a graphic object, which involves issues such as these:

The Open Graph protocol defines four required properties:
og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "The Rock".
og:type - The type of your object, e.g., "movie". See the complete list of supported types.
og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. We support PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. You may include multiple og:image tags to associate multiple images with your page.
og:url - The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/.

Aren't the folks at Facebook great the way they make everything so clear? While I wasn't irrevocably opposed to figuring some of that out at some point, I kept nosing around. This citizen of the blogosphere is diligently working the issue, though so far without a breakthrough.

Finally I posted a cri de coeur on Facebook to see if anyone else was struggling. My seminary bud the Rev. Gwynn Freund, vicar of a church in San Diego, helped out. So did my brother the Very Rev. Canon Robert Cornner, who told me he'd been able to post from his Google Blog to his new Timeline page.

I'd been resisting Timeline. I like the simplicity of the old Facebook. But I made the switch, and sure enough, as the presence of this post on Facebook attests, I'm again able to post blog links to the status box without being absolutely certain about the canonical URL of the object that will be used as my permanent ID in the graph.

Did Facebook purposely make it harder to use its service to impel customers to use Timeline? One does wonder. But when the curia rules, what can we do but obey? Besides, as I usually remind those who complain about Facebook, it's still, uh, like, free. Bloggers can't be choosers.

Now: Who's going to be the first to get a sermon out of "canonical URL"?