making facebook more useful for you - use rss and blog import

As a person who is an ardent fan of Facebook, I have to admit that I’ve become increasingly disappointed with the amount of information that gets populated into my news feed. I’ve discovered that I can consume far more information than the feed provides, the refresh of the feed seems slow, and on top of that, Facebook’s secret-saucy algorithm decides which of my friends I should be seeing posts from, which results in me missing posts from other friends in my news feed.

If you have the perception that you post a note on Facebook and that note will go to all of your friends’ feeds– you are wrong. Well, it will populate into a person’s Notes or Posts page, but frankly a lot of people don’t check those pages frequently (if at all). But regarding the news feed, if your friends don’t log on for a few days, or if you have more than, let’s say, 10 friends, you posts and notes simply will not go to all of your friends. Do not consider that Facebook is a platform for broadcasting information to all of your friends, because it simply does not function as a broadcast platform yet.

But if you do want to read all your friends posts and notes — you’re in luck — because you can do it very easily via RSS subscriptions. I’ve been using subscriptions as a “safety net” to capture posts and notes that don’t go directly into my news feed. A few people have been asking how to do this (because it isn’t very obvious on the Facebook platform), so here is a simple step-by-step guide to setting up RSS feeds from Facebook:

Create an RSS Feed for your friends’ posted items:

• From your profile page, go to posted items: (Go to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php)
• On the lower right column you will see an RSS icon with the title: “My Friends’ Posted Items”
• Click that link and it will automatically give you a feed that you can use with Google Reader, Bloglines or other RSS Aggregators.

Create an RSS Feed for your friends’ posted notes:

• From your profile page, go to notes page (Go to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php)
• On the lower right column you will see an RSS icon with the title “My Friends’ Notes”
• Click that link and it will automatically give you a feed that you can use with Google Reader, Bloglines or other RSS Aggregators

Import a Blog

If you want your blog posts to go into your Mini Feed, you can do a quick import as well.

• You can get to the “Import a blog” page from Notes (on the lower right column), or go directly there with this link: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import
• Enter Web URL or RSS and voilá - you are done!

Special note to frequent blog posters though: Facebook reserves the right to stop your feed if they feel you are posting too many times in a day and “could result in your account being disabled,” so if you are a blogger who writes multiple posts in one day, it may be best to not use this option.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under productivity, socialmedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.