Mmm…food

Hi everyone,

I recently enhanced the format of the Facebook stories you publish with Mealstrom.  The goal with those posts is, of course, to make them as visible and as interesting as possible for your friends and assorted hangers-on.  Purely anecdotal evidence from my own meal blogging seems to show that the new feed story works — a lot more likes and comments per story — and I hope you’ll find the same.

Mealstrom’s previous story format kept a very light user message, putting most of the story into the title and the body.  This was in keeping with the my (too conservative) understanding of what was allowed and with the older version of feed stories.  As you can see, though, it produced a visually soft result, filled with gray and small text.  No good!

Old feed story -- staid.

The new Facebook story uses your meal description as your user message — the big, black, luxurious block of text that shows so prominently.  Many thanks to my friend Luke for suggesting that change.  It’s a big improvement.

New feed story -- snazzy!

The story title now also includes the picture count to tell viewers if there’s more to see when they click through; previously, your amazing fifth picture might as well have been a blank wall, for all anyone would see it or know about it.  Thanks to previous though then-unmentioned updates, viewers can now share your meal, view your meal blog on Mealstrom.com, or start their own.

Naturally, this isn’t the end of the (feed) story.  The newly blank space under the pictures is going to be perfect for showing whom you ate with once I roll out friend tagging.  It may also show what you thought of your meal (via the new Eating Habits tools mentioned in a recent post), where specifically you ate, or other cool new things.  You’ll get finer control over what gets published as these changes roll out, too.  (Anything you’d want to see published?  Leave a comment!)

That’s that for today — have a great 4th of July (bbq for me!) and happy eating,

Alex

PS Bonus retrospective: to give you an idea of how things were when I was your age, check out the original feed story format.  It’ll give you an idea of how much better things are now.  Egregiously, you didn’t see the whole meal — I hadn’t yet accepted the value of being fully open and giving users the power to completely share their data, so the feed story cut off at about 300 characters (without even a “more” link).  There was also no way to share a post (not that the current way is great; Facebook needs to open up the popup share form their own posts get to use).

Like discovering ancient cave paintings.