I’m an occasional Facebook user (mostly to communicate with cousins and former co-workers) and yesterday wanted to tell a fairly simple story about what it is like to spend one’s birthday with a Border Collie:
- drive to Costco
- put Ollie (15 weeks old) in a fabric crate in my car and roll the windows mostly down
- while shopping, receive call from the Costco tire shop saying that Ollie was with them (he’d managed to escape the crate, apparently, and then jump from a height of about 4′ out the car window and onto the pavement)
- once safely back home, turn around to observe Ollie throwing up a bunch of ugly-looking orange stuff on carpet (apparently there were some edibles in the Costco parking lot)
- use SpotBot robot to clean up hurl
This simple story exceeded the Facebook limit on characters by about 25 percent. How are people using Facebook to tell stories then?
If you go to the Profile link on the top right, then to the Notes tab on page and say that you want to create a new note, you will get a page that you can type a whole bunch of stuff into.
I have never found a character limit on a note, although I’m sure there is one.
Make a “Note”
Or write your intro as the status update and add your own comments to it to continue the story.
Post a “note” instead of a status update. A small digest of the note will appear in your feed, and you can share the note with others.
“Notes.” That’s how I’ve seen stories told and essays written.
Glad Ollie didn’t escape too far.
I believe that the Notes app will allow you to publish longer items.
A monologue on Facebook is a recipe for frustration. A dialog with photos-you might get some interaction and satisfaction.
Break the story down to its elements: dog in car, dog escapes, dog hurls, Phil cleans up.
Facebook ~= Blog.
People usually attach a photo or video, type in the explanation of the photo as a beginning to the story, then finish it in the comments. It’s pretty klunky, but that’s the way I’ve seen storytelling on FB done. Either that, or make a Note, but no one does Notes anymore.
You might want to investigate the Kurgo car harness. Works well on my two escape artists. They are a local company (manufacturing is offshore, no doubt). The harness can be purchased at Pet Source on Marrett Road.
Andrew: Thanks for the Kurgo suggestion. It looks good, but right now I don’t feel that I can trust Ollie not to chew on the seats, dashboard, etc. I left an aunt’s Otter Hound in an old Chevy for about one hour and came back to find a melon-sized hole chewed in the dashboard plastic/foam. As Ollie seems happy to chew on ankles, wrists, shoes (with or without feet inside), furniture, frogs, sticks, etc., I’m not sure why he would refrain from chowing down on the seats.
It’s even worse if you are writing in Russian – Facebook counts unicode characters twice.
drv2costco Ollie 15wo->crate in car, wndw dwn, shpng, rcv call costco tire shp: Oli w/t’m, jmpd dwn 4′, bk hom, oli thrwd ugly orange stuff, SpotBot clnd up.
The essence of the status update world is brevity. As many people wrote, notes are more like blog posts in Facebook.
The brevity issue is interesting. Why did twitter get so popular limiting people to just 140 characters? While that’s a very short space, the secret was that it’s much easier to convince people to subscribe to your twitter feed or see you in their facebook feed because you have promised to, or been forced to be brief. So more people will follow you. If you ask me to subscribe to your blog, I am committing to reading longer essays, and people are not as ready to commit to that.
As to what the optimal length is, I don’t know. There may not be one.
Facebook for me is basically a repository of links to other places to let them tell the stories. Yes, it’s an extra click to another website, but I can’t see how that’s essentially different from a note (the only difference being you stay within Facebook with a note.)
However, for the reasons posted above, I find the brevity issue does lend itself towards overly sarcastic or dramatic introductions to a link.
If you link to one of the longer writings on your main website, you get the added bonus of having one of your awesome pictures be an icon for the post.
Notes are Facebook readership poison. No one reads them. Instead, serialize your story into the first part (posted as a status update), then post the second part as a comment on your status update.
While we’re here: Facebook has made it easy to take a quick photo with your cameraphone, write a short teaser status update as the photo’s caption, then unload the full story in a comment on the photo. Just limit yourself to only one photo, as multiple photos are grouped into an “album update”, which then hides the captions and makes the images smaller, and, no one reads them.
What I’ve seen Facebook users do is, write a blog post with their longer-than-allowed story and then post on Facebook a link to the blog post.
I’ve had a Facebook account for almost two years. I rarely post anything myself, as I don’t seem to have anything particularly interesting to share that I think best belongs in the abbreviated, semi-private world of Facebook. I’ve never used Twitter at all…
Glad to hear that Ollie was ok, and cheer up- given that Ollie is a Border Collie, with his smarts, the next time he will just hot wire the car and take off – easily condensed into d*** or whatever……
If Ollie loves to chew things, then you might want to consider a Kurgo Wander-Hammock for the back seat too. I think the Wander-Hammock was designed for dogs like Ollie.
I am glad that Facebook does not allow one to tell a story like this. Pets SHOULD NEVER BE LEFT IN A CAR UNATTENDED. I know you are an intelligent person, and surely you had a “small lapse” on this day.
This is my second run-in this week with a pet in a car. The first was on Sunday, at the Marine Museum (A must see if one comes to the Washington D.C. area) where someone had left their pet in the back of their enclosed cab truck, in a cage with merely a side vent window in a parking lot. Not too worry, I notified security immediately and I would have done the same for your pet, regardless of the temperature. I shall apologize in advance for “sticking my nose” in someone else’s business, but Pets unattended in cars DO NOT GO TOGETHER!
A cool day for us, is NOT the same for your pet!
http://www.hsus.org/pets/pet_care/summer_care_tips_for_you_and_your_pets/
I have shared before that I am thankful for your posts and intelligent thoughts, but I hope you can see a different position on this issue.
JJ Donovan
Be sure to end each part with a cliffhanger.
Just then I heard a crash, the squeal of brakes, and someone screaming. I ran toward the noise as quickly as I could, but when I got there, I could only watch helplessly as Ollie (to be continued)
…
(continued) lifted his leg against a tree.
JJ: My last dog probably spent close to 1000 hours in parked cars; he lived to 13.5. He was often reluctant to get out of the car because he regarded it as his rolling private home. Did he get too hot in the car? Massachusetts in January is not a time when people traditionally complain of being too warm.
During my attempted confinement of Ollie, the outside temperature was about 70 degrees. The car was in a covered parking lot and therefore, had the sun been shining (a rare enough event here in Massachusetts), there would have been no heat gain from solar radiation.
If the automakers had a little more imagination, a parked car would be an ideal environment for a dog any time the outside air temperature was comfortable. The car would be able to run the existing cabin ventilation fan (perhaps reversing it to an exhaust mode) when its existing temperature sensor (in cars with automatic climate control) found that the temperature was above 65 degrees. When the temperature got above 75 and/or the battery was getting low, the car would send a text message to the owner saying “the dog might be getting uncomfortable”. If the temperature got above 80, the car would roll its power windows down and send out some additional text messages.
(Some of the same logic would protect babies accidentally left in their backseat prisons. A modern car often has a computer running full-time (alarm system) and a microphone (for the cellphone Bluetooth interface). It should be able to figure out that a baby has been left in the car and that the car is hot and it is time to alert someone.)
Hey Phil, Ollie looks adorable, but how did you come at the decision to add a border collie to the family instead of a samy?
I would really like a more dog-catering car over here. I’ve two samoyeds (well one is a husky-sam mix) that I run with cart and sledge, and an additional default rescue corgi.
– I probably really just need to get a dog truck with kennels in the bed at this point. – At best so far I have to leave them within eyesight (frequently eye contact), such as parking in front of a coffee house. Their desire to be with me or my partner is stronger than my Toyota’s structure could take, if they were committed to escaping.
Loke: Why a Border Collie? I wanted a dog that I could train to do outrageous tricks. And also a dog who would be naturally obedient rather than grudgingly obedient. So far, however, he has been more difficult to train than was Alex (housetrained at 9 weeks and very quickly good with the basics of sit, stay, down).
One of the new Honda cars has a dog lovers option. Years ago there was a camper truck parked in Cambridge with a couple of dogs in the back and a big sign saying the ‘animal people’ were aware of the situation and approved. Sad world when you worry about someone calling the cops and not your pet.
http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/02/09/2010-02-09_hot_doggin_in_2010_element_hondas_suv_offers_poochfriendly_options.html
The real functionality of transporting your pet is in the rear, where Honda has its own factory precision nylon-webbed car kennel. The dog can rest comfortably on a padded pet bed zippered inside the webbed kennel. There’s also a rear ventilation fan, a spill-resistant water bottle and a ramp for dogs that are not able to hop out of the vehicle on their own.
Besides the nice digs, the dog is secure, which keeps it safe and restrained while driving.
The additions are a $995 option and are exclusively on the 2010 Element EX. Honda offers the Element in LX, EX and SC trims.
GB: I looked at http://automobiles.honda.com/element/dog-accessories.aspx and the fan is basically useless. It blows air on the dog, which might be of some use if dogs cooled themselves by perspiring through their skin the way that humans do. The fan that would be much more useful to run is the fan that is already in every car: the main ventilation fan. Alternatively, an exhaust fan pushing air out the side or the roof. Check http://www.maxxair.com/ to see what the RVers have. These move 900 cfm and could easily be run from the battery pack of a hybrid car. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_size_class says a car interior is about 100 cubic feet. So the standard RV fan would exchange the air 9 times per minute.