Getting more out of Facebook

OK – I promise to shut up about Facebook for a while after this, I really do belong to many other fine social network sites and following on from Ben and Dave's posts around the upcoming data sharing summit: interoperability and open standards are important kids. Also, the fact that Facebook can do whatever it likes with your data once you’ve put it in there (of course you remembered to read that user agreement, right?) makes it a hard site to recommend for collaborative and developmental work.

But I’ve had a few people ask me about Facebook RSS feeds, and what exactly it is that you can get out. The granularity of Facebook provides a ton of options, but can also make finding your way around permissions sets a bit tricky. It’s worth while spending a bit of time familiarising yourself with who can see what and how – especially as your public updates, posts and notes can theoretically be exported off site and outside the happy protected sphere of your hand picked 'friends'. As usual, it’s just a question of remembering that if it’s not something you’d be happy turning up in a Google search for your name, don’t post it publicly in the first place.

There are 6 feed options altogether: Three types – status updates, notes and posted items, with two choices – all your friends, or an individual (friend or yourself) – if you have permission. Info on all the feed options is here (it doesn’t look like you have to be signed in to read it either)

The feeds at the moment are pretty clunky – for example, if you’d like to export information around a certain topic, you can forget it. Facebook doesn’t use tags to organise data that make it difficult to see how they’re going to refine the export options.

In order to export your status updates to other sites and services, you probably have to check your privacy permissions. Hit privacy, applications and then Notes privacy settings. You’ll need to select “anyone who can see my notes can export them”. Then head back to your profile page, click through to mini-feed see all and select status stories. You should now find a feed option at the bottom of the tab.

Thanks to Michael Pick and Luke Rankin for tips.

Comments

[Anshuman]

Hi Jo,

Here's an interesting link that take a slightly more 'how to' approach to using Facebook - http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/07/24/12-ways-to-use-facebook-professionally/

Including things like tweaking news feed preferences and privacy settings.

The feeds seem to have been in the works for a while and it'd be interesting to see how deep they go.

Now I'm trying to set up a network at work and it seems well nigh impossible!

[Josie]

Thanks for that Anushuman! I'm just happy I scooped Techcrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/14/facebook-opens-up-their-data-feeds/

[Michael Pick]

Nice post, and great resources! Thanks for adding my rant to these otherwise great tips. I threw together a quick screenshot tour a bit after this one too for those that might still be stuck tracking down that well tucked away status feed. I won't spam the direct link, but it's easily found if anyone should need it.

Great blog btw - I have you right up top in my social media feed.

Cheers,

Michael