Facebook - no RSS???
Yes, there is no RSS on Facebook. 
Also, it's very much a walled garden. Its URLs are ugly, and its color scheme is boring. Borringgg.
And yet, it's the best social network I've used so far. In fact, I think their own description on the Facebook home page - a social utility - may be the best description for it.
Lifestreams are great, but the Facebook News Feed is carefully balanced, well thought of and a useful combined stream of most of the things I care about. And if there is something I care about which isn't supported yet by the News Feed (e.g. is outside the Facebook walled garden), you can count on someone creating a Facebook app that will add support for it.
With interaction models ranging from casual and lightweight ("poke is the new ping!", originally by Eran) all the way to personal messages, the social interaction rules defined and implemented by Facebook strike a good balance between sharing and privacy.
Of course, as wonderful as it is, Facebook wasn't really complete until now - but now that we introduced Yedda Questions & Answers for Facebook, I think we can safely call it perfect :)
P.S. Still, I'd love to have an RSS feed on my Facebook News Feed. Duh.
P.P.S. 
Subscribe
5 comments:
there is one RSS feed! click on 'see all' next to status updates and there it is.
fully-featured it ain't, but it's better than nothing.
Simon,
Are you sure it's an RSS feed? I don't see there an actual RSS feed that can be read by external feed readers.
yup. on the right hand side there's a 'subscribe to updates' bit with an RSS button. We all have our feeds running in Netvibes here so I didn't imagine this.
Here's the RSS faq:
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=23
Now I get it. You are right, there is RSS feed for a specific person status updated or posted notes. But there is no RSS feed for my own News Feed ( = the Facebook-selected aggregation of the various events that I may be interested at, from my friends, groups, applications, etc).
I'm really hoping for an RSS feed of the news feed. I'd like to put events that happened in my facebook world on my joomla page but the few RSS feeds that Facebook provides just doesn't fit... the news feed / mini-feed data would be perfect but there is no RSS for it. Ironic that a "News Feed" doesn't have an RSS! Makes me wonder if Facebook is really trying to open up and be the social network that people really want or if they are trying to hold on as much as they can and just pretend that they are opening up.
Post a Comment