We recently launched our French Facebook Page and we (as the Ninjas in charge of our respective Facebook pages, French (Kossi), English (ME!)) gave each other a hard time about who could and would have the most fans.  Now, to be fair, the original CodeWeavers Facebook Page (not counting the time it 'disappeared' -the chocolate has dulled the pain btw-) has been around for a while, about a year and a half give or take a few months (and the original, original that the Myth, the Legend, Jess created was even longer until the fateful day it 'disappeared').

So, I'm not ashamed to say, I'm winning, nyah nyah.  But truth be told, I haven't done much and I'm very thankful that people just keep 'fanning' us on Facebook.  Yet, Kossi is having a hard time and let's face it, it's not much of a competition when you completely smoke someone.  What I'm saying is, if you're French, check out our French Facebook Page and consider 'fanning' us.  And of course, if you are not French and you didn't know we were out there, check out our English Facebook Page and consider adding that to your many 'fanned' pages on Facebook.

Finally, just to top it all off... we are going to have a competition for the customers.  It's all online and you have to do something to get entered... and then you have to be a fan of the respective Facebook Page to know when to give us your entry.  The prize, one year of support on a Pro License of CrossOver. 

For now, all you have to do is visit our homepage and find the Easter Egg (and if you don't know how, the instructions are posted on the English Facebook Page), that's it.  Then, keep that image burned in your mind and stay tuned for further instructions.

Cheers and have a great weekend!

You see, we had this FaceBook Profile a long, long time ago.  But, instead of being set up as a page, it was set up as a user.  At some point in time someone (probably FaceBook) decided that users must be real people and not entities, who knew?  This was about one week after I took over the realm of the FaceBook account.

Enter six months of exchanges between the FaceBook team and myself.  They were very helpful in the beginning, but we all know that FaceBook has grown to be the massive social online entity that it is and if you haven't recently noticed, people that always swore they'd never join are joining.  Suddenly, SURPRISE, your mom is reading your status.  This is my excuse for the FaceBook team not getting back to me.  It's a very good excuse, knowing how difficult it can be to give tech support to a wide range of people.  And, one person jumping up and down about how the company profile was setup wrong and could you 'please fix it for me' certainly could get lost in more important things to do (but if I find out they have an arcade cabinet... ^_^).

I finally gave up.  There was no getting access to the page, there was no updating it.  It had sat stale for months with 150+ fans... kind of embarassing.

I created a new page.  Not only did I create a new CodeWeavers page, I PIMPED a new CodeWeavers page.  I showed it to everyone, I posted about it, I put it in forums, I sent a link to it to everyone who wrote to us asking to be our friend on FaceBook.  Then, I set up 'Selective Twitter' so that our esteemed COO, Jon Parshall could, indeed, post to FaceBook from Twitter if he so desired (and it worked until that fateful day last week that Twitter went down... and even then I got it back to responsive later in the day).  THEN, not feeling that that was enough, I enabled our RSS Feed to update the page status.  I added a plug for the Wine RSS feed as well (them's my peeps, and I love developers!).  I went through the trouble and hardship to 'register' the FaceBook page from a text message without subscribing poor Jeremy White to the FaceBook app (can't use my company phone to verify, no texting... hint, hint!).  This allowed me to put up such fantastic videos as the Left4Dead preview on FaceBook and try to launch my voice acting career with the MS takeover video (still waiting for the phone call...).

My point is... it was working beautifully.  Sure I had to jump start the RSS feed now and then.  Sometimes Twitter was flaky, but it was okay.  And there was that duplicate page out there somewhere that FaceBook staff would not respond about that I couldn't touch...

Yes, that duplicate page.

You know how some people just can't stand a messy desk or desktop and how sometimes they think they have to have every thing clean.  You know... neat freaks.  If you could see my desk you'd know I'm not one of them.  I have post-it notes everywhere (I am the post-it note queen...), a mess of notes from things to do to notes about what the customer on the phone is trying to ask me.  My car keys often get lost on my desk, my iPod traverses through the dangers if it's not charging (that's when it's got an anchor to one of three computers at my station).  I have a container with used coffee grounds in it (they are for my compost, don't judge!) and... well, you get the point, I'm not neat.  And, sometimes it means I lose track of things... and don't go thinking my desktop is any better, it's actually worse.  I am organized... but not neat.

Our system administrator is neat.  His desk is relatively clean, he keeps everything running and is master of freeing up space (he proved this last year during our 'special' promotion that fried the servers).  This comes in handy 99.9% of the time.

Today was that other .1%.

You see, he has been set as an admin to both CodeWeavers' pages for some time... and apparently the stars aligned, the mood was right... and he discovered where to remove the duplicate page from FaceBook.  Or so he thought.

Yes, the trick is the 'delete' function apparently uses the name of the page and one thing lead to another...

*censored*

We have a new FaceBook page:

  http://www.facebook.com/pages/CodeWeavers-Inc/142527800089

Selective Twitter is broken and the CodeWeavers' Staff Blog feed is throwing a fit.  Wine RSS is working (of course), so there is hope.

I'll have it all whipped into shape soon.  Until then, I'm the 'chocolate makes an excellent apology' Ninja!

Cheers!