The beginning poker players have recently became very enthusiastic about the possibilities of Facebook. They write their poker blogs there by using the Notes application, publish their favorite videos, and add screenshots of their winnings in their photo galleries. And they are satisfied with it. However there are some important features that Facebook is missing.

Poker blog should contain a bit more than just a simple text and a few pictures.

Let’s see why Facebook is NOT suitable for running a poker blog.

Cons:

• HTML knowledge is needed in order to add links through Notes

• The URL of a blog post is very long and cannot be changed, so it is difficult to share outside Facebook

• Google search has a lot of trouble finding the blog, so it does not appear in search results

• Difficult to add YouTube or any other embeddable videos

• Difficult to add poker hand flash replayers to illustrate poker hands. The hand log also cannot be converted, there is no option that would allow depicting hand ranks as images

• The blog does not have a name or a slogan

• It is not possible to customize the blog's design templates

• No possibility to add a blogroll (links to friendly blogs)

• No possibility to add a traffic counter, Technorati widget or any other HTML widget like Twitter updates, custom RSS from other blogs, Follow me or ShareThis buttons

• No possibility to add a banner with an affiliate link to earn some money from referrals

However, although Fackebook lacks a lot of features, there are some good things about writing a poker blog in Facebook Notes as well.

Pros:

• Possibility to add links to the profiles of the people that are mentioned in the text (if they are in your Friends list, of course)

• The new blog entry is automatically posted on one's Wall so all of their friends can immediately see the new post and read it.

• Images from the existing photo gallery can be used, so there's no need to upload them again. And vice versa.

• The format of the blog makes it easy to read

• Possibility to subscribe to all blogs through the RSS

If the poker blogger's needs are only the basic ones, then it is OK to write in Facebook. The only problem is that the blog's traffic depends on how much friends one has and will they comment it or recommend the blog post on their Walls. Such friends can bring a lot of traffic and new readers.

The moral of this article is that poker bloggers should clearly define what they are going to write about, what are their expectations and then decide where to start their poker blog – at some general or poker-related social network, free blogging engine like Wordpress.com, Blogger or LiveJournal or hire a programmer to set a personalized blog under their own domain name (that may cost from tens to thousands of dollars). Once the blog is started, it cannot be easily transferred from one platform to another.