Back in May Facebook shut down an application that converted your Facebook news feed into its RSS equivalent. In theory it makes a lot of sense but unfortunately Facebook claims that such actions violate their privacy policy. Months later another developer has released an RSS application which displays the most recent stories in RSS format.
The new system doesn’t appear to use Facebook’s Open Stream which makes me guess this one will be shut down as well. It’s unfortunate because this is clearly a feature that many users want. Listening is one of the most important social media activities and the more formats that users have to consume information, the easier it is for them to listen. Unfortunately none of the RSS applications use authentication when a user views the feed currently.
For example I can take the RSS link provided by the RSS News Feed Reader application and send it to others and it’s instantly accessible without any form of authentication. In other words the feed stories have become public and I didn’t need to provide anybody with my Facebook login. Despite Facebook’s open stream policy, there’s still no way of consuming the feed via RSS. Whether or not Facebook shuts down the latest RSS application, the company needs a more effective way of consuming the feed however a user wants.
While developers can create an RSS application and simply keep it private, the average user isn’t going to go through the same complex process. For now we’ll have to wait and see what Facebook decides to do with this application but my guess is it will go the same way as RSS applications of the past: down the drain. Do you want to be able to access your news feed via RSS?
Admittedly, I did try a while back to RSS my newsfeed and was disappointed that it had been removed. However now that I c the reason behind FB shutting it down, I agree 100%. For once FB is actually protecting my privacy rather than exposing it. If there was a way to combine RSS and FB authentication, we would have the perfect solution. But until then, I much rather not have every Tom Dick & Harry spying on me & my 40% of nonsense chatter. It's bad enough that Big Brother does already…
Comment by June Green — August 18, 2009 @ 6:22 am
I just got my LinkedIn updates as an RSS feed and it has been incredibly useful. It would be nice to have this for Facebook too, but I doubt it will happen officially any time soon.
Comment by Will Robertson — August 18, 2009 @ 6:43 am
This WILL get shut down. It forces you to give permission to the application to read your stream. Clearly against Facebook TOS.
Comment by Francis Pelland — August 18, 2009 @ 7:34 am
What's the URL to subscribe to this reader? I signed up for this app on FB, but I don't know address to add on google reader.
Comment by Julie — August 18, 2009 @ 9:02 am
Just let it be optional. I don't want RSS on my personal profile but that shouldn't stop someone else from making theirs available.
But what really gets me is that there is no RSS for a Facebook Page. Those are public by default and Google searchable. Why no RSS then?
Comment by Rob Williams — August 18, 2009 @ 9:11 am
Do you mean homepage stream instead of news feed?
Comment by Mark — August 18, 2009 @ 11:15 am
Introducing a 'Facebook Reader' could work, especially if we were able to log into the social network and interact with the RSS feeds of our friends. The only problem with that is the walled garden of Facebook which would prevent activity being available outside the site..
Comment by Joe Dawson — August 18, 2009 @ 2:20 pm