Those of us who have been on Facebook for a while are well aware of the potential for drama to occur on this popular social networking website. Ancestry.com has launched a contest on its Facebook page, that has unintentionally caused quite a bit of drama. It seems the entry form doesn’t work correctly.
I was on Facebook yesterday, when I noticed an ad that caught my attention. The ad said something about a historic, holiday card, that Ancestry.com had on their Facebook page. I decided to check it out, if for no other reason than it had the potential to be something interesting enough to write a blog about.
In order to access the holiday card, you have to click on a link that is on the side of the Facebook page. Sadly, this link wasn’t working for me. A quick glance at the “wall” of the Ancestry.com Facebook page showed me that I was not the only one who couldn’t access the holiday card. There seemed to be some sort of technical error happening, and it appeared that someone who was manning the Ancestry.com Facebook page was aware of it.
I did return to their Facebook page a few times, to check and see if the problem had been fixed. It hadn’t by the time I was ready to go to sleep, so, I decided to try it again today, instead. Overall, the problematic broken part of the page wasn’t really that big a deal to me.
However, there appears to be quite a lot of people who are really upset about something else that is not working on the Facebook page. Ancestry.com is holding a contest that has something to do with the “Warhorse” movie which is a Steven Spielberg film that will be in theaters on Christmas Day of 2011.
Although I don’t know much of anything about the movie, I have learned that the prize for the contest is a trip to London. There are a lot of people who are members of Ancestry.com who learned about the existence of this contest because Ancestry.com sent them an email that contained a link that brought people to the Ancestry.com Facebook page. You cannot enter this contest from the Ancestry.com website. The only way to do it is from Facebook.
The problem is that the tab that is supposed to allow people to enter the contest is dysfunctional. Just like the holiday card, the contest is inaccessible. This has lead to rampant speculation about exactly what Ancestry.com was intending when they sent their members to their Facebook page. Some have questioned whether there truly was a contest, or if this was all just a “trick” to send people to their Facebook page.
Personally, I understand enough about the internet to realize that sometimes contests and apps that are connected to Facebook just do not function as they were intended to. It has something to do with the amount of data that Facebook needs to stream every time the ads at the side of the page need to refresh. This is a problem that affects the functionality of many of the Zynga games that are on Facebook. Everyone needs to calm down, take a deep breath, and try and enter the contest on another day.
Image by Marilyn Peddle on Flickr