I gave GreenTaxi over a week of silence in honor of my mother’s passing. With this time, I wanted to A) spend my time on higher priority personal matters and B) let the last blog post announcement sit as a main post for a bit of time to make sure all of her friends and family got the news.
As a quick recap, we set up a Facebook page for her shortly after her passing. The purpose was to help spread the news, to share photos, stories, and updates for the service, and to provide something for people to visit in the future to read up about my mother. Some thoughts from this experience.
- Facebook does not have an category for memorial events. In the end, I had to choose “Other – Ceremony” as the event category for her service.
- It is interesting to see how waves of groups of people find the page. We received comments on the wall from several family members and close friends at first. Then we got a wave of comments from Seattle friends of myself and my brothers. Then came a wave of California friends. Most recently, we have seen a wave of her closer friends that were not on Facebook before (or used it sparingly) only to sign up just to visit this page. We’ve seen these waves before with other pages. I wish Facebook did a better job of portraying graphically or statistically how smaller networks of people “fan”-rush a page.
- It frustrates me that only an admin can upload an album of photos, even if the ability to post photos is open to the public. Fans are only allowed to post single pictures at a time per wall post.
- Pages are still very misunderstood, even among active Facebook users. The heirarchy and structure of Facebook is not easily understood to a common user. Often times, people have posted a link to the page on their wall and others comment on that wall post with a great comment or story about my mom, rather than posting that comment on the wall of the page itself, which was where I know it was meant to be (to be seen by all of her “fans”).
- Page “insights”, which are the statistical analytics of a Facebook page, are extremely delayed. From what I can tell, they are anywhere from 3-4 days behind the real-time interaction. It is strange to me how they could be this delayed.
- Admins of a page should have the ability to interact as both themselves (“Conor Neu”) and as the Page (“Jeanie Holmquist Irvine 1950-2009″). There are many pages which are local brands and businesses that have multiple admins, yet all of their posts show up as the Page responding or posting. On a memorial page such as this, I am glad to create the page and post updates as the page admin, but I would also like to interact as myself on the page as well.
No related posts.
Jean has been a friend for many years, but our real connection came when she moved to Indianola. Since we live on Bainbridge Island, it was easy to find reasons to see each other in our ‘hood. Jean has enriched our lives in many ways, but I must say that the one thing that was so obvious and so present was her love of her boys. Jean was a mother extraordinaire…to ALL her boys. Their happiness was her biggest concern. Whenever we were together, it was her boys that she talked about, worried about, and concentrated on. Each and every one of them were her focus. She was the pink fluff in a male household…the softness, the cuddle, the sweet hug and kiss. Her musical laugh soothed and comforted all of us. As my mother would say, she was a “steel butterfly”…which is the ultimate compliment. She was strong and beautiful. We all loved her very much.