I make no secret of the fact that I detest Facebook.  I despise its user interface (which I find confusing and difficult to navigate).  I find Facebook’s approach to security and privacy concerning. And I’m much happier with a single web of sites than one that consists of several huge islands – even if one of those islands currently has around 600 million users.

Unfortunately, normal (i.e. non-geek/media) people, including many of my friends and family, insist on using Facebook, so I have an account there.  Actually, until earlier this week, I had two (one personal, one professional) - then I learned that was in violation of Facebook’s terms of service and, if detected, Facebook reserves the right to terminate all of your accounts, so I deleted one of them.

Because I dislike Facebook so intensely, I’m not a great citizen there – I log in from time to time, and that means that I don’t really participate in the network properly.  My Facebook status updates are populated from my personal Twitter account and I recieve e-mail updates on any comments. But recently, I noticed that the Twitter Facebook app was not updating my Facebook status and several of my friends were having the same problem.

I tried denying the app access to my Twitter account and then allowing it again, but that didn’t seem to work. Then I found a Facebook discussion thread, where Derek Lau wrote:

“Go to http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/
Uncheck the box that says ‘Allow Twitter to post updates to: Facebook Profile’
Refresh the page to make sure that the box really is unchecked.
When the box is unchecked, send a tweet. This will obviously not get posted to FB.
Go back and re-check the box. Refresh the page to make sure it is really checked.
Now send another tweet.”

Sweet. Now my Twitter updates are populating Facebook again, and I can go back to ignoring it for a while longer…