Five Things You Can Do With This New Facebook RSS App
Sometimes the low-hanging fruit holds the most potential - but it's hidden in plain sight. Facebook opened up the activity streams of users' friends this week to outside developers to put into new interfaces. The showcase examples in the news were things like Facebook-inside-desktop-Twitter applications. A San Francisco developer named Teck Chia saw another opportunity.
Chia built a Facebook application that you can grant permission to pull your Facebook newsfeed out of the site and publish as an RSS feed. It's called Newsfeed RSS. It's a simple thing, but it's an important development in the gradual opening of the walled garden that Facebook has been. Just to give you some ideas, here are five things that can now be done with the Facebook RSS feeds that Chia has set free.
It's important to note that the feeds Chia's app publishes are not secure feeds. They are only secure through their obscurity. You probably won't be able to figure out another user's feed URL. The feed is also without images or links right now, though Chia says that might change in the future. App notifications are also not included. Messages posted to Facebook are delivered though, and that's probably what's most important.
Here's what mine looks like right now:
What can be done with this? Why would you want your Facebook newsfeed as an RSS feed? RSS is an incredibly pliable technology - now this app makes the newsfeed pliable too.
1. Ambient Awareness
Believe it or not, not all of us are glued to Facebook all day. Plug your RSS feed into Gmail Webclips, a startpage/dashboard like iGoogle or Netvibes or another RSS reading app and you can notice Facebook updates in passing. You may receive more updates to your Facebook feed than it's realistic to read - ambient awareness can give you an opportunity to catch missed items serendipitously. I do this with lots of other RSS feeds and can see how it would work well with one from Facebook.
2. Filtered Watchlists
Hard-core social networkers have friends and then they've got particular groups that they keep an extra close eye on. In many fields Facebook may be home to more of the conversation than Twitter is. Why not filter your Facebook RSS feed for just the usernames of particularly high-priority people to you and then consume that filtered feed through a high-priority system of feed reading? Yahoo! Pipes is probably the best way to filter those feeds, but there are many options.
We can imagine some people setting up a filtered list of people for whom they want to be able to respond in near real time, thus building relationships with those people fast. We can also imagine some people being really annoying with this tactic, so don't be that person.
3. Follow Facebook Friends via Twitter
Many of us are already pushing Twitter updates into Facebook. (Our poor friends on Facebook! Imagine the deluge.) Why not pull our Facebook friends out into an RSS feed and then plug that into Twitterfeed or PingVine to populate a dedicated Twitter account for you to follow? You can't reply directly but you can monitor the updates that way and click through to interact on Facebook.
4. Cache in a Feed Reader or Other System
Throw that feed of updates into a good RSS feed reader and you should be able to search an archive of friends' updates.
5. Follow Facebook in FriendFeed
You can sync your personal Facebook status updates with FriendFeed and share them with your friends on that aggregation service, but why not add your new Facebook RSS feed as an "imaginary friend" (just an RSS feed) and then monitor what all your Facebook friends are doing through the FriendFeed interface.
All you need to do is "like" or "comment" on any of the items that come in that way and all of a sudden all of your FriendFeed friends will be able to see your Facebook friend's update. Whether they have permission in FriendFeed or not. [Update: Phil Glockner says this isn't quite how it works, below in comments.]
Something tells us that this "walled garden" that is Facebook can't possibly remain closed forever. The web is just too fluid, and the social web is even more so. The information that Facebook holds is just too useful to keep locked up in one network.
You can install Newsfeed RSS here.
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The day of Facebook's announcement, I wrote and released an open source PHP library that lets anyone create this exact Facebook app, I wonder if Chia used my library?? :-)
here is the link to the source code, if you want to make your own app that does this same thing.
http://github.com/voitto/facebook_stream/tree/
-- Brian
Posted by: brianjesse.myopenid.com
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April 29, 2009 5:51 PM
Unless they changed the way FriendFeed handles imaginary friends, just commenting or liking an entry from one does not make it visible. You have to re-share the entry in order for other people to see it.
thanks Phil, that's news to me.
App link is:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=70450313499
I really like option three for repurposing Facebook news from your network onto Twitter. I would certainly check a new Twitter account dedicated to this feed using Tweetie (it would simply be another one). Even better would be the ability to map Twitter accounts to the Facebook updates to strike up a conversation easily on Twitter too.
Cool.
great idea. much easier way to filter the feed then Yahoo! Pipes - go to: http://alpha.shyftr.com, request an invite and filter away.
(2) and (3) would be pretty useful together. I'm presently just reading the RSS in my reader (though seldomly), but I'll have to set up a personal Twitter account as in (3). Guess the convention would be somthing like @FB (and private?). I'm doing some selection a la (2) with a Yahoo Pipe that discards any posts less than 80 characters. It's a naive filter but pretty effective at reducing the noise that is the FB stream. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=9f4f5a7fe74177201f644a0cc2df4ed0
I've thought about discontinuing my pushing of Twitter -> FB since every time I run into one of my FB friends they ask What is all that junk in your updates?? Of course referring to RT, #, @, and trying to squeeze real meaning into 140 chars.
Awesome app! Just subscribed to my facebook newsfeed on my google reader!
I find it somewhat ironic that this application takes the richness of the activity stream format (since it is ATOM at is base) and converts it the lossy RSS format.
If you were to take an activity stream formatted feed into Pipes, I wonder if you could do more interesting thingsâlike filter by activity type or actor. I mean â that's the whole idea!
Posted by: factoryjoe.com
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April 29, 2009 11:43 PM
Actually, the feed is, in fact, in the activity stream format. (Check the source to see) I guess we are using 'RSS' in the generic sense since people are familiar with that term.
How does this app work/work around the 24 hour limitation facebook has in the term of service? Once the data is out and replicated, there is no way to put if back in. No? I am missing something?
Edwin, I think that's the dilemma that Facebook faces... is it against TOS/privacy policy to have user's data in machine-readable format (vs. human-readable text like in most other apps)?
Same dilemma exists in RSS syndication of email (assuming authentication and permissions are given.)
A way to filter out application spam would by itself be a good reason to read the newsfeed through some RSS machinery.
Does this not raise some pretty big privacy issues? You could publish your "friends'" updates (updates that they think are just going to their approved network of friends) to the whole world and they wouldn't know it.
I guess it just reinforces how conscious you need to be about what you're saying on Facebook - and know that absolutely anyone could be reading it now.
Didnt facebook used to have an rss fee? I swear I used to subscribe to something like that, but now its gone
As Chris Messina (8.Factoryjoe) said the Activity Stream is an Atom Extension and thus would it also be possible to use Google GData Query to extract value?
But the real value is in the aggregate of all my friends and being able to query/filter my social graph and I am sure Facebook is not going to let that cashcow out of the door for others to profit from. Hopefully they will bring out these type of analytical tools soon.
Awesome app, I'll have to see how I can properly pull and display this into my WordPress.
RSS is way underused as a method of aggregrating your activity around the web, probably because there aren't so many great and well-known/used RSS readers. I swear by RSS and use it to monitor activity on a load of social sites so that I don't have to visit each to see what people are up to. I'm pleased I can now add Facebook to the list.
We use RSS extensively on our site, with a general RSS feed of sales leads as well as specific RSS feeds for each of our Group Networks. They're pretty well used with an increasing number of people picking them up in Google Reader.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
There is a "Selective Twitter" app for Facebook that only posts status updates to Facebook when you include a #fb in your tweet. This has saved me a whole lot of heart ache and confusion of non-Twitter users.
As someone who only visits Facebook every once in a while I can see this as useful. The privacy issue is something to think about, but over all this could be useful. Besides how personal do people get on social sites. I know I don't get all that personal as its still an open forum regardless of restrictions. Of course I may be in the minority and do not use social networks for personal information, just something to use to pass the time when I'm bored.
I really need to publish my fan/public page post to a newfeed. Does anyone know if or when that will be possible?
Great news. It will be exciting when / if they:
- include images in the feed
- allow customization of author / entire graph
Here is a how-to on turning that RSS feed into a Facebook Feed Widget using Widgetbox:
http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2009/04/30/facebook-feed-widgets-using-widgetbox-new/
This won't last more than 7 days. Once FB realizes it's leading to apps violating the 24 hour cache restriction (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Storable_Information) it'll be shutdown.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
It looks like this app has been removed...
I'm quite impressed with feedmil.com, a search engine to find microblogs that are related to your interest
No more app, no more feed rss...
You could also use FeedVolley ( http://feedvolley.com ) to style your feed with a custom HTML template and create a web page for your feed - eg for people who aren't on Facebook etc..
It's Good that facebook is showing security concern though facebook manage to attract lots of news homepage these days with its new policies and updates.
I would certainly check a new Twitter account dedicated to this feed using Tweetie (it would simply be another one). Even better would be the ability to map Twitter accounts to the wow gold http://www.game4power.com Facebook updates to strike up a conversation easily on Twitter too.
Sometimes the low-hanging fruit holds the most potential - but it's hidden in plain sight. Facebook opened up the activity streams of users' friends this week to outside developers to put into new interfaces. The showcase examples in the news were things like Facebook-inside-desktop-Twitter applications. A San Francisco developer named Teck Chia saw another opportunity.
Five Things You Can Do With This New Facebook RSS App http://bit.ly/aRDRk (app that turns newsfeeds into rss feeds, use cases) [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/1654329157]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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May 24, 2009 10:35 AM
i gust want to say some thing "great job"
Update your Twitter randomly according to your intrest Or, from Rss Feed Or, from your own tweet message list Or, Any combination of the above three http://feedmytwitter.com
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I really like option three for repurposing Facebook news from your network onto Twitter. I would certainly check a new Twitter account dedicated to this feed using Tweetie (it would simply be another one). Even better would be the ability to map Twitter accounts to the Facebook updates to strike up a conversation easily on Twitter too.
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still doesn't know much about rss.
I'm with you, aks.
i didn't know that thank you