I am not ashamed to admit it that I am a fan of Facebook. I post pictures when I’m on the road (much to my wife’s chagrin) and it has been the way to keep up with what my family is doing, as we don’t seem to talk on the phone very much. One of my absolute favorite things about Facebook, however, is being able to track certain interests that I have, specifically music, and to keep those separate in an Interest Group page an off of my normal News Page. That is, until Facebook apparently broke something and now my Interest Pages are all broken. My ‘guess’ is that in one of Facebook’s frequent updates to their security (or lack there of), someone broke the ability to isolate your like pages to an Interest Group unless you also allow them on your News Feed. That’s a pain!!

I searched around the Facebook Help Page and found lots of others are having the same problem. I also found that Facebook has pretty much ignored this new ‘feature’ and is pretending the problem doesn’t exist. I really miss being able easily track my favorite bands, music magazines, and concert halls all in one place.

My first plea is to Facebook. “FIX IT!!“

My second action was to take matters in my own hands and to create a work-around until Facebook “FIXES IT!!!” It involves a little bit of manual work up front, but I’ve found it to be pretty good in keeping me up to date on my 60+ Facebook pages that I used to follow in my Music Interest Page. It involves the following services/programs:

  1. Facebook2RSS
  2. Feedly
  3. Outlook (optional)

I’ve talked before about converting Facebook pages to RSS feeds on company information, but the same concept works for Interest Pages as well. The steps are easy (but as I said earlier, there is some manual processes up front to make it happen.)

  1. Take your list of Facebook Like pages and open the URL for each one.
  2. Copy that URL and go to Facebook2RSS, paste the URL in the text box and click the “Generate” button. This will give you the Facebook ID for that page that gets added to the RSS feed address. NOTE: the standard RSS feed for Facebook is this:
    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=[fbid]
  3. Go to your Feedly account and create a New Category under “Organize” and then Add Content into this category.
  4. Repeat (this is that dreaded manual process I’ve been talking about.)
  5. Once you have all of the feeds in the category, you can export the OPML file and import it into Outlook.

I have found that doing this has reinvigorated my interest in Feedly both on my smart phone, and within the Chrome or Firefox browser (because Feedly doesn’t work in IE for some reason). It has also been a good way for me to keep up with my interest in music, bands, and venues until Facebook FIXES THE INTEREST PAGES!!!

If you’ve found other workarounds for this problem, let me know.