Finding the RSS feed for your Facebook status updates

June 11, 2010 by JD
Filed under: RSS Feeds, Social Networking

I use RSS feeds quite a bit to keep track of what I have said and to learn what my friends are saying on their blogs and social networking sites.

One thing has been bothering me and I just haven’t had enough energy to track it down and implement it until this morning.

In the left and right columns of this blog, you’ll find several RSS feeds showing recent updates on several of my blogs and several of the social networking communities I manage. It makes it easy for me to visit this blog and see at a glance what is being said on my other sites.

So, what’s been bothering you, JD?

I’ve been wanting to add the status updates I’ve posted to Facebook, but I didn’t see an easy way to find the feed. I’ve looked at the source code for my Facebook profile page and saw no evidence of an RSS feed, so I would just let the matter drop and/or forget about it.

This morning, I decided to give it another go. To make it easy on myself, I decided to see if anyone else had solved the problem. No use reinventing the wheel, right?

I did a simple search on Google for “Facebook RSS Feed” and found the answer to my question on the very first page returned in the search results. (Gotta love that!)

On TechLifeWeb.com there is an article: How to find your Facebook Status RSS feed.

Apparently, Facebook has changed how this works, but the updated information in the article helped me find the RSS feed I was looking for.

So, I came here and added a new RSS widget to the right column and pasted in the URL of the feed.

It didn’t work.

I knew the feed was working, because I could view that URL in Safari and see all the recent status updates I’ve posted.

Then I looked closer at the URL. When I changed feed:// to http://, the RSS feed widget correctly displayed my status updates. You can see them in the right column of this blog.

It’s not a huge thing, but it’s difficult to find.

Facebook makes this more difficult than it should be, but it’s still possible to make use of it with a little digging.

All the best,

Tags: Facebook, RSS

Comments

4 Comments on Finding the RSS feed for your Facebook status updates

Mitch on Sun, 13th Jun 2010 10:07 am

Hi John,

You know, I just haven’t fully embraced the “track me here” type of thing yet. At least not unless I can control it. That’s why I don’t have my Twitter feed show up on FB and vice versa, and don’t have any of it showing up on my blogs. Maybe one day.

JD on Mon, 14th Jun 2010 8:51 am

Good morning, Mitch.

I’m not sure what you mean by “control it.”

I’ve been integrating my RSS feeds on various sites for a long time and I know that some of my readers find me on one site an interact with me on another as a result of those RSS feeds.

Now that I’m unable to work like I used to, more of my interactions are personal rather than business-related and I know that’s somewhat different from what you’re doing.

What is it about the process of interlinking RSS feeds on your various sites that bothers you?

All the best,

Mitch on Sat, 26th Jun 2010 1:29 am

Hi John,

By control, I mean I want to be able to determine what shows up where and when. For instance, I could link Twitter and Facebook, but there are things I say on Twitter that I don’t want showing up on Facebook, and vice versa. There are also sites that will let you link up all of your connections together, if you were on other social media sites, and I’m not interested in that either. That works for some people, but for me, nope.

JD on Sun, 27th Jun 2010 11:28 am

Hi Mitch,

OK, now I think I understand what you’re saying. Since you want to segment what you’re doing on different sites, I can understand why you don’t want everything consolidated.

I lump all my activities into several RSS feeds that give a good overview of what I’m up to, in case anyone besides me is interested. (grin)

I know it’s not for everyone, but it tends to work well for me.

Act on your dream!

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