One of the issues I have with bookmarking Facebook Pages, or heck, any webpage from Facebook, is its URL. The permalinks don’t really work the way you’d expect them to. The URL can change depending on what page you were on previously, or whether you were using the Search function, or viewing the wall, etc. (For more info, have a read on Facebook URLs can reveal your browsing history | FBHive.)
For example, JASTRe is a department under Ministry of Development and they have a Page on Facebook, and its URL is as follows:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bandar-Seri-Begawan/JASTRe-Brunei-Darussalam/80905247210
However, depending on how you browse Facebook, the URL is not fixed like that. I got this one when searching from JASTRe (despite already being on the Page :P):
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bandar-Seri-Begawan/JASTRe-Brunei-Darussalam/80905247210#!/pages/Bandar-Seri-Begawan/JASTRe-Brunei-Darussalam/80905247210
And I got this one from right-clicking on the “Wall” tab:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bandar-Seri-Begawan/JASTRe-Brunei-Darussalam/80905247210?v=wall
What happens then, is that if different people bookmark the JASTRe Page but under different URLs, then the link will show up three times, separately, if you search Delicious. It won’t register as the same link being bookmarked by 3 people, so you can’t get a good gauge of the link’s popularity.
This is similar to last.fm‘s problem with artist names and scrobbling. If you misspell an artist’s name in your music library, then your playing of the artist’s song will be “scrobbled” to the wrong artist. Imagine that out of 5000 listeners of that song, 10% of listeners also have the incorrect version of the artist’s name, meaning that at least 500 plays are left out of the artist’s statistics. Some people do get pissy if their artists are not as popular as they think 🙂 Last.fm does now have an auto-correcting function, though I don’t believe it is available for all artists.
What about Facebook “usernames” or “vanity names” you ask? These are the names that shorten the URL and make it easier for people to give out the URLs to their Facebook profiles or Pages.
Unfortunately it’s still the same story. Here is the “clean” version of Simpur Net’s Page URL:
http://www.facebook.com/simpurnet
However if I searched for Simpur while I was JASTRE’s Page, then the URL for the Page would look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bandar-Seri-Begawan/JASTRe-Brunei-Darussalam/80905247210#!/simpurnet
Anyway, that is just me complaining on behalf of anyone who cares about the popularity rankings of links in Delicious 😛
