ReadWriteWeb

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.