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Facebook Photo Tagging Apps: Intelligent Design or Plain Old Spam?

Posted on September 14, 2009 by jessestay

The photo tagging apps in Facebook have taken over my stream! Check out the screen shot to the right. Out of the 12 highlights, only half are legitimate posts. The other 6 are apps that have seemingly figured out how to abuse the system and take over my highlights section (either intended or not), giving the apps even more exposure on Facebook. If you ask me, this method of app promotion, while legal and probably even a smart move by the app developers, needs to stop!

Fan Check, Friend Character, PickupFriends, TouchGraph, and others are nothing more than spam with their current techniques of app promotion. From my experience most people using them have not even opted to tag their friends in these photos, and I hope Facebook can put an end to this. The developers behind these apps (probably many who have read my book) are smart people – can’t they find another way other than deceiving their users to promote their applications? Or perhaps Facebook can give me a way to filter these so they don’t take up my Highlights any more and I don’t appear as tagged.

I’m hoping “Natural Selection” for these apps sides in my direction. Let’s hope these types of spammy apps go away or change their behavior.

Twitter Starts the Chatter on API Guidelines

Posted on September 10, 2009 by jessestay

On the Twitter development mailing list today Twitter began discussion on rules developers should abide by when writing applications for the Twitter API. Such terms come on the heels of a much broader Terms of Service launched for the general Twitter user today. I’ve long discussed the need for such guidelines, as many developers are embarking on an unknown adventure when writing apps for the platform, unable to tell when something they are doing is breaking rules for Twitter platform usage. We’ve seen this get out of hand with the launch of many “get-rich-quick” applications, along with applications that Tweet on your behalf either in public or DM form without your knowledge.

Twitter’s initial platform guidelines include the following, stating that developers of Twitter applications must:

Identify the user that authored or provided the Tweet, unless you are providing Tweets in an aggregate form or in anonymous form in those exceptional cases where concerns over user security and anonymity are involved.

Maintain the integrity of Tweets and not edit or revise them. Tweets may be abbreviated for display purposes and as necessary due to technical limitations or requirements of any networks, devices, services or media.

Get each user’s consent before sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating with your application does not constitute consent to send a message.

Get permission from the user that created the Tweet if you want to make their Tweet into a commercial good or product, like using a Tweet on a t-shirt or a poster or making a book based on someone’s Tweets.

The most significant of the 4 items is that apps will no longer be able to send Tweets on a user’s behalf without their permission, although this is unclear if this includes automated DMs, and if this permission must be on a “Tweet-by-Tweet” basis or not. In addition, users can feel secure that their Tweets will not be used without their permission in a commercial endeavor, although I’m pretty sure Copyright law will protect this.

This is a great move by Twitter, and one I strongly welcome. Even if it prevents some developers from building applications, it sets the record straight so they know what they can, and can’t be doing. Keep in mind that this is only a proposal at the moment, and nothing is set in stone. You can contribute to the discussion on the developers mailing list.

Wishlist Wednesday – Facebook Connect for Retailers

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jessestay

I think we may be onto a tradition today. In celebration of @jesse mccartney’s birthday (see my last post for background), I’ve got one more wish. This one is for Retailers and how they can better integrate Facebook Connect. Specifically those with physical store locations – I think this one’s pretty cool, and would be really simple to implement! The idea is the ability to truly identify individuals visiting your store.

Here’s how it would work:

Customers download a custom app for their cell phone (this would probably be most effective on an Android or Palm Pre phone). This app connects them through Facebook Connect and logs them in to your store.

On your servers you identify the individual’s Facebook account (by simply storing their Facebook ID with their customer account) – you now know exactly who they are – their name, their location, their interests, and more.

When the customer visits one of your stores, their cell phone recognizes they are at that location (assuming they’ve given it permission to do so), and you’re able to identify the customer is now at one of your stores. Now, imagine the implications:
- The customer needs help – they push a little “I need help!” button on their cell phone. Immediately a CSR is notified, and they can send someone, to their exact location within the store, to help or answer questions. They can even greet the individual by name!
- The customer visits the cash register. The cash register realizes this and immediately brings up the customer’s name so the sales rep can greet them by name and even know a little of their past history with the company so they can help further.
- Your company could keep a list of influential bloggers. When they visit your store, you are immediately notified, and you can ensure they are getting the best experience necessary.
- More importantly, you now have a record of exactly how many people are visiting your store, who they are, various demographics about those people, and what they’re purchasing, if they’re purchasing anything.

Let’s take this a little further now. Imagine if your customers could track their friends that are also shopping at the store. They could organize shopping trips, see what others amongst their friends are buying, view the most popular purchased items amongst their friends, and more. Or perhaps you could release a coupon to individuals and only allow them to share it with 5 of their Facebook friends. There are so many possibilities when you think about actually being able to identify individuals, and their friends who physically shop at your stores.

When thinking Facebook Connect don’t just think virtual! I would use something like the above, and I know many others will too, especially in a privacy-controlled environment like Facebook. What other ideas can you think of, mixing GPS with Facebook Connect?

My Facebook Connect Wishlist (for WordPress)

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jessestay

Today everyone seems to be wishing me a Happy Birthday – it’s not really, but it is @jessemccartney’s birthday on Twitter, so I get all the “ZOMG Happy Birthday @jesse mccartney” Tweets from uber-excited fans. Some times I throw them a bone and tell them how much I love them as well. It’s fun to celebrate your birthday twice a year, so hey, why not? So I thought I’d celebrate @jesse mccartney’s birthday on Twitter with a wishlist of my own. Take it as you may, but my hope is that maybe it inspires you just a little bit to go out and create something, especially if you’re a Facebook developer. And if you don’t do it, I will. Eventually.

Here’s my wishlist. All of these are ways I can see Wordpess could be used to integrate Facebook, but no one has written a plugin yet to do what I want – please check out the documentation at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect for an overview on what you can do (it’s actually quite easy!):

1. A single, standalone “Connect with Facebook” button plugin – so many Facebook plugins for WordPress try to do too many things in one plugin. I want to be able to build my own Facebook integration. Add a little component here. Add a little component there. Nothing more. So, do do this, I need, at the very basic level a “Connect with Facebook” button that shows up somewhere on my blog just by installing a WordPress plugin.

You could take this further though. What if you also provided a script that reads the e-mail addresses of commenters and automatically registered them with Facebook so that if I ever wanted to do a to encourage my readers to invite their friends, they could very easily? The button could appear as an overlay that appears once for each user, and if they opt not to log in, never appears again. When the user logs in via Facebook you automatically register them with a Facebook ID.

That’s all the plugin will do. Its focus is simply login and registration and loading the basic Facebook Connect libraries, nothing more. If you want it to do more, use another plugin that builds on top of it.

2. TweetMeme for Facebook plugin – if you haven’t had the chance yet, go look at Mashable.com, now. See their Facebook share button underneath the retweet button? That’s what I want, but I want more. Here’s how I see it:

A reader reads an article. They want to share it with their Facebook friends, so they click on the share button.

WordPress, via a plugin, calls the stream.publish() to enable the reader to publish the article to their own stream.

Your plugin tracks the ID of that particular share, maybe even prompting the user for read permissions, and adds it to an array of shared IDs in an options storage in WordPress.

On every load of that particular article, each share’s likes are read, counted, and updated in another stored variable in WordPress.

The sum of all those likes is displayed in the share button, and other readers can also share to their friends and contribute to the number of likes for that article.

Of course, this would rely on the blog owner installing the Facebook authentication plugin above in #1

3. A “publish to Facebook” plugin that works – there are already lots of publish to Facebook plugins for WordPress. None of them fully utilize Facebook Connect though, especially the stream methods. What if I could publish a blog post, have it automatically also post into my Facebook stream, and at the same time, track every comment and like of that specific post and then post comments to the share button above, while listing comments of the particular post down below my blog post comments? Or, let’s take that further. If one of my friends on Facebook comments on the blog post itself, I also want that friend’s same comment to show up under the published stream item on Facebook as well. I think that would be incredibly useful.

4. A “leave a comment” plugin that works – I think the same could happen with comments. TechCrunch is doing this somewhat. A user that comments should have the option of publishing that comment to Facebook in the user’s stream. What also should happen though is that comment ought to be tracked. Now, when any of a user’s friends that are also previous commenters on that blog comment on Facebook, they also appear threaded underneath that specific blog comment on the blog. Or vice-versa.

5. A standalone friends widget – I want a friends widget just like the Google FriendConnect widget you see over to the right. It ought to come with a “subscribe” button, or “join my community”. When a reader subscribes, they automatically (unless they opt-out) get new blog posts for your blog added to their stream on publish, real-time. This would also work great if you develop RSS reader software, as you could also automatically subscribe the user to the blog in your reader. Again, it should be standalone though – people should be able to mix-and-match, and this would also rely on #1 above being installed.

6. An activity streams plugin – I would put this top on my list if I could (even though it’s at the bottom, because it’s the most code to develop). If you haven’t had the chance to yet, regardless of your political preference, go check out what HuffingtonPost.com has done with Facebook Connect. Log in with Facebook Connect there and you’ll see one of the coolest implementations of Facebook Connect I’ve ever seen. I wish they would release that to the open source community as a Facebook plugin for WordPress.

All the activity streams plugin needs to do is track activity of readers on a blog. A new view of the blog would appear, showing all of your friends who are also readers of the blog, and a historical news feed or timeline of what they’ve just read, what they’re commenting on, along with any other cool activity that may be pertinent. The idea is to help a blog’s readers discover new content on your blog. This plugin could track the most popular blog items, most commented, etc. and display those on the side for readers to discover. Each stream would be custom to that reader and their Facebook friends that read the blog. It could also have options to invite friends to come check out the blog.

This specific plugin could also integrate with #5 above and enable a reader to click on one of their friends, and see only the activity of that specific friend. Or, when inviting their Facebook friends to check out the blog, it could provide a way for each of those friends to subscribe and automatically receive new blog updates for the blog in Facebook.

The possibilities are endless, but I think you catch my drift. You can even package all the above into a single plugin, but I also want separate plugins. This stuff, to my knowledge, has not been developed yet, but it should. I want you to go out and build it before I’m forced to – these are free ideas and a great way to show your talent, get some free exposure here (I’ll write about each one that does this effectively), and a great amount of traffic from both Facebook’s plugin directory and WordPress’s plugin directory when you’re finished.

Let me know if you’ve written one of these – either let me know in the comments, e-mail me, send me a “Happy Birthday @jesse mccartney” or whatever. I hope I’ve started your brain juices flowing – I’m salivating at the thought! (mmm…brain juices)

Dave Winer to Bring Realtime RSS to Millions via WordPress.com?

Posted on September 7, 2009 by jessestay

Today in a very inconspicuous post by Dave Winer, he demonstrated that his new real-time RSS protocol, rssCloud, could very soon be available to the millions of blogs, real-time on WordPress.com. Dave Winer, who played perhaps the most significant role in defining the RSS standard and the subsequent RSS 2.0 standard through which most blogs are read today, is taking the long-known extension to the RSS protocol to the masses with some sort of relationship he has built with Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com.

rssCloud vs. PubSub Hubbub

rssCloud was defined in its early form in 2001 as a solution to provide a “next step” for RSS to get instantaneous updates from blogs or websites wishing to push information immediately to readers. The readers weren’t quite ready for the standard at the time (see the Guitar Scene in Back to the Future), so it sat stale until this year when real-time updates again came to front and center for getting and retrieving massive amounts of information as they happen through sites like Twitter. Dave Winer says he adapted it in order to provide a better, more open microblogging solution that works outside and independent of Twitter.

Here’s how Winer explains it works:

1. The Writer gets an idea.

2. He or she enters it into the authoring tool, saves, it goes to a file, a feed.

3. The authoring software sends an Update ping to the Cloud (which is just a bit of software running on EC2).

4. The Cloud checks to see if anyone is subscribing to the Writer, and finds that indeed the Aggregator is.

5. He updated! says the Cloud to the Aggregator.

6. The aggregator then reads the feed, finds the new stuff and informs the Reader.

After less than a second the Aggregator has the update and the user is reading the content, real-time.

Pubsub Hubbub works similar. With this protocol, you have a “hub”, rather than the cloud, and the content provider pings the “hub” for every new post. The reader can then request to be notified by the hub (or hubs) if there is any new data. Google has taken the initiative on this particular protocol and is utilizing FeedBurner as their initial hub. The protocol is also designed for mostly blogs, rather than microblogs, which seems to be the space which Winer is targeting with rssCloud.

What’s the difference? Quite honestly I’m trying to figure that out myself. It would seem that the major differences are that a) with rssCloud, feeds expire after 24 hours, so aggregators need to make at least one call a day to notify the Cloud that they want to be notified. This has the advantage in that the Cloud doesn’t have to continue pinging even when aggregators aren’t there, but also increases the number of calls an aggregator must make.

The other difference is that Dave Winer is an individual developer while Google is a big company. If you ask me that doesn’t matter much due to the fact that these are both open protocols and both seek to decentralize the control of our data. Google’s response is disconcerting though where they seem to try and discredit Winer’s protocol. The more of these protocols the better (also see the OpenMicroblogging protocol). However, it is very appealing to see an individual developer, the inventor of RSS, so-to-say, take a protocol that has been around much longer and adapt it to work with modern standards. I want to see Dave succeed, but I hope they all work together. This is a space everyone benefits, despite the competition. Keep in mind that Dave isn’t the only guy behind this protocol either – there is an entire governing board that manages this standard.
Competition for Twitter?

So with this potential development, what does this mean for WordPress? First, millions of blogs will now instantly be real-time in the same way Twitter is real-time. Second, where Dave Winer wants rssCloud to be targeted towards the micro blogging space this could very well mean WordPress could be looking at something in that area to compete with Twitter. I predicted this at the beginning of this year, remember?

Here’s what I see happening: Automattic will utilize its BuddyPress and P2 platforms to create a decentralized microblogging platform that utilizes rssCloud to provide real-time updates. Wordpress.com will be extended to enable “mini-blogs” which accompany your existing blog and provide real time status updates anyone can subscribe to. Clients like Seesmic, TweetDeck, and PeopleBrowsr will utilize the rssCloud protocol as Aggregators and allow you to view all this data in one place in ways you could never do before.

Dave Winer’s demonstration today is HUGE news for the blogging world and decentralized micro-blogging. I can’t wait to see what happens.

UPDATE: You can download the WordPress plugin for rssCloud here. StayNAlive.com is now officially one of the first rssCloud-enabled blogs on the internet.

A Man Without a Party

Posted on September 7, 2009 by jessestay

I’m going to stray from tech for just a post here and vent a little. I’m going to bring up a word I warn some may find offensive. I am not a profane man. I simply do not use profanity as I feel it degrades who we are and distracts from plain English. This word is the best term to describe the situation I am in politically though: Bastard. I’m a man without a party. I didn’t go anywhere I don’t think. I’m pretty sure my party left me.

I grew up in a conservative home where I was taught values of respect for our nation, honor for our liberty and this nation’s values. I grew up in a home where we uplifted and supported and strengthened our President because he was our President, and politics aside, he was the one leading and representing our nation to the world. I was taught faith in a supreme being, love for our troops, and gratitude to those that had served us before.

I was taught to pay my taxes, and to not be wasteful of the money I have. I was taught not to go into debt. I had trust in a government that would do the same. I was taught to be self-sufficient, and at the same time give what I had left over to the poor. A scripture I grew up with taught me to “succor those that stand in need of your succor”, and if I had not to give, “I [gave] not because I [had] not, but if I had I would give.” I was taught to participate in government, be a loyal citizen, to vote, and to volunteer where possible.

My parents taught me great values, and where they didn’t agree with a politician, they were careful to let me know why they didn’t agree, and let me make a decision based on that knowledge. I don’t think I remember my parents ever admitting to loyalty to a single party of choice. When we asked who they voted for, they would not tell us, because it was “none of our business”. They wanted us to choose. Their politics were individual decisions, and they wanted us to make our decisions based on values, not politics.

I grew up with both my Grandfathers being former Colonels, one in the Army and one in the Air Force. One of my Grandfathers, a Purple Heart-decorated Colonel with 12 kids and a very strong family, taught me at a young age to salute the flag when I wore the Boy Scout uniform, and to put my hand over my heart and stand when flags were presented other times. He taught me to sing the national anthem when it was sung, and to learn the words.

My other Grandfather, also a World War II veteran and double-flying-cross decorated Colonel taught me the value of faith, and how it can carry you through the worst of times. He taught me leadership, and regardless of political boundary, why remaining true to your values was more important than anything. He served in the Pentagon, met various Presidents and dignitaries, but no matter what, he went to Church every Sunday, stuck to his values, and respected his Nation with all his heart. He continued to teach these values to Cadets as he started the Air Force ROTC at Brigham Young University. He lead a family of 7 children and continued teaching those values at home, instilling the same respect in my Father, who taught these things to me.

Values. Faith. Respect. Liberty. Justice. Integrity. Honor. Charity. E Pluribus Unum – “Out of many, one.” I’m saddened to see not a single party supporting all of these virtues. I’m saddened that the what is supposed to be “the conservative party”, the Republican party, is ruining the image of our President’s office just as bad as the Democrats have previously. I’m saddened that our leaders have become corrupt, seeking popularity and politics instead of integrity, honesty, and virtue like my Grandfathers above. I’m saddened that children now have to seek Permission slips to see their President speak this week. I’m saddened that we’ve lost our core family values so much that parents can no longer teach their children values to learn on their own what’s right and what’s wrong.

The Republican party, whom I thought was my party growing up has deserted me. The Democrats are too far in the other direction. I’m saddened that I’m in actually what appears to be the majority of Conservatives at the moment. Where is our Party? I’m afraid my friends, that I’ve joined the ranks of the many Conservatives who belong to a leaderless Bastard Party. Maybe that is where I belong now, faith, values, virtue and all.

To the Whitehouse and President Obama: Thank you for this amazing opportunity to have my kids learn who their President is and what he wants them to hear. Sure, we’ll be talking to them when they get home about your speech, but what an amazing opportunity this is! Never in the history of this nation has the President had the technology available to do this, and this Conservative is grateful for it.

To the Republican party, my Republican party (or what I thought was mine): look at yourselves! Here’s a great video by John Stewart that describes the perception (in the image of Fox News, in this case) which you’re becoming:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Fox News: The New Liberals

www.thedailyshow.com

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:246922

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

This post was posted at Exactly 9:36pm MST

Posted on September 4, 2009 by jessestay

Okay, not exactly my shortest post ever, but this post is to demonstrate that posting to your blog is just as real-time, if not more, than Twitter.

Hey Businesses, You’re Using Facebook Wrong

Posted on August 30, 2009 by jessestay

Robert Scoble just finished a great blog post on why he thinks Twitter is worth much more than people give it credit for. He cites its ease of use for businesses and open nature as an easy way for businesses to target customers. He and I had a conversation about this on FriendFeed, and while I still feel Facebook has the upper-hand here, it definitely has to open up a little more in order to be completely on par with Twitter. However, there is a side of Facebook businesses aren’t yet fully utilizing and they need to start – it’s a wealth of information and user connections at their hands if they just embrace it. The part of Facebook businesses are completely missing is Facebook Connect.

In my conversation with Robert we were discussing whether Facebook or Twitter had a better UI. I think our conversation may have been moot, since in the end the part of Twitter most people see is via a desktop client of some sort. Many of us are seeing trends via TweetDeck, or friend lists via Seesmic and similar. Or perhaps we’re searching via PeopleBrowsr. There is a majority group of people out there that simply aren’t aware of the basic UI Twitter has on its own Twitter.com website. Yet at the same time I don’t think developers are coming anywhere near close enough to what they could be embracing with the Facebook API for desktop clients – there is so much developers are missing when it comes to Facebook!

Regardless, even if you take the plain-Jane websites and compare them with each other, Twitter, while much more open and easier to find archives than Facebook out of the box, pales in comparison to Facebook when you compare UIs. Facebook has threaded conversations. Facebook has friend lists, and you can sort your feeds by friend lists. You can completely control who sees what you post on Facebook. You can’t do any of that with Twitter. Facebook has likes. While Twitter has favorites, I can always do the same on Facebook and “share” a link or similar to my profile and anyone can always reference it later under my links. I can separate my links, videos, and photos (which appear in-line, not via 3rd-party service) from my main status update stream if I want to. You can view just my links, just my videos, or just my photos, and for links even download the stream as RSS. You can do real groups in Facebook – on Twitter you have to hack it with hashtags. You can organize true events in Facebook, and store a full profile about yourself or even your business. Keep in mind that most of this is also available to your business as well. It seems to me that the ONLY thing Facebook lacks is a decent way to search (while they do have that too, it’s still limited), and a fully open version of the site that businesses can easily embrace like they do Twitter. It would seem Twitter still has a lot to catch up to. Yes, that’s a big thing, but much more simple to put in place than all the other things I mentioned above.

Now, back to my original point about Facebook Connect. On FriendFeed Robert said to me, “I’ve talked with dozens of businesses and they all say Facebook isn’t working as well for them.” I believe he’s seeing that. I think the majority of businesses are using Facebook wrong though. Even though I say that I also know, consult, and talk to dozens of businesses in which Facebook is working for them. Some businesses are using it right. Ask Digg how they’ve done since integrating Facebook. Ask Huffington Post how well they’re doing now that they’ve integrated Facebook. What about FriendFeed’s integration? Heck, even my SocialToo saw a huge spike since we integrated SocialToo Status into our product line, utilizing Facebook. Or what about Geni, or iLike, or Flixter? All these businesses were still businesses before Facebook. Facebook is what has given them an incredible boost since their integration though.

Businesses aren’t integrating Facebook Connect as they should. Here’s what Facebook Connect is – with just about 3 lines of HTML-like code (it’s called XFBML in Facebook terms) and a small snippet of Javascript that you can basically just copy and paste, you can have your site’s users logging into your website (didn’t have a log in before? Well now you do, along with your very own social network of 300 million people.) with hardly any effort whatsoever.

Now, let’s get a little deeper. Facebook Connect, with the help and just a few hours time of one of your own coders, can take your existing database of users and find out how many of them are already Facebook users. My bet is most of them are (remember, there are near 300 million Facebook users on the planet!). Now you can prompt those users to begin telling their friends about your brand to their closest friends and relatives, using just the tools Facebook provides, ALL ON YOUR OWN WEBSITE. Oh, and even better – unlike Twitter, your users never, ever, leave your website when authenticating with Facebook. You simply won’t get that intimacy between your brand and customers on Twitter.

Have social features already on your website? Look at what Digg is doing with Facebook Connect. Every single user that joins Digg through Facebook Connect, or associates their account with a Facebook account for the first time through Facebook Connect, AUTOMATICALLY has their Facebook Friends who have also done the same added as friends on Digg.com as well. Automatically, with no work on your users’ part, you can associate your users with their already existing social graph on Facebook, let them communicate, send stuff to their wall, their friends’ walls, and more, all simply via the Facebook API, ON YOUR OWN WEBSITE.

Twitter pales in comparison to what Facebook can do for businesses. The majority of businesses are just using Facebook wrong. If you manage a business’s marketing or brand management campaign and only have a Facebook Page, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. The power of Facebook isn’t about Facebook itself, but about the vast set of APIs Facebook is providing to you and your business to get your brand into the most valuable place of all – that intimate setting between a customer and their close friends and family. You can’t do that with Twitter. You can with Facebook. This is why if Twitter is worth $5 billion, Facebook is worth at least 2 or 3 or more times that. Your business needs to get in and use Facebook right if you’re going to stay ahead of the game.

Robert Scoble is giving Mark Zuckerberg free consulting (his points of which I agree with) – I hope this bit of free consulting for your business was helpful too. If your business is to see even more value than they are on Twitter, you MUST be using Facebook Connect. That is the way you embrace Facebook as a business. Contact me if you need any more help than this. As a software developer on both networks, this is why I got into Facebook – it’s why I’m still bullish about the network.

Now to get back to coding…

When Did Facebook Remove RSS for Friends’ Status Updates?

Posted on August 28, 2009 by jessestay

Yesterday it was mentioned in an interview with Facebook iPhone developer, Joe Hewitt, on Dave Winer and Marshall Kirkpatrick’s podcast, “Bad Hair Day”, that Facebook did not have the ability to retrieve your friends’ status updates via RSS. I was taken by this, as this was something I wrote about back in January, and it was indeed possible, with a special key only known to the profile owner, to get an RSS feed of your Facebook Friends’ status updates. So I tweeted out the link last night thinking it would be useful.

I tested out the link today, and it turns out that Facebook some time in the last several months seems to have removed the Friends’ RSS updates feature. Joe Hewitt, who works for Facebook, seemed to be surprised by it yesterday as well, as he too had seemed to think it was possible until looking for it.

My hope is that this was just overlooked and Facebook in the near future will release the Friends’ status RSS feed again. Facebook has made many changes to their News Feed and Wall lately, and my assumption is that it just got overlooked at some point. Having that available via RSS, and a user-controlled level should be no problem so long as it is only displaying status updates marked with the privacy control “everyone”. Maybe that was the problem and they’re fixing it.

So for now it would seem you’ll have to get down and dirty with the API to have any sort of access to a person’s friends status updates. That’s okay in my book, but having a little more standards-controlled ways of retrieving this information would also be useful on a different level. Help me David Recordon, you’re my only hope!

UPDATE: It looks like if you previously had subscribed to your friends via RSS the link is still working. It seems that just the link has been removed – does anyone know how to find it now?