Edit:As of recent changes (7/2/2010) to FB, this is no longer working for me. You might have better luck. Why don’t facebook just make this stuff available?

Edit: This method has worked for my account and several others, but fails for some people. If you are greeted with the message “This feed URL is no longer valid. Visit this page to find the new URL, if you have access, http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?status&id=XXXXXX” or something similar then you are one of those unfortunate people. Currently looking into a solution for this problem… anyone found it?

I’m working on a ‘lifestream’ plugin for the next version of my website, and hit a little bit of a wall when trying to lay my grubby little paws on an RSS feed of my personal status updates on Facebook.

Although they don’t seem to publicise it on the site, there appear to be RSS feeds available by direct access of almost everything we post. It’s pretty obvious really. The only issue is finding the URL of the feeds.

For a personal page

The simplest way to do this that worked for me (although browsing around there appear to be some people experiencing difficulty) was as follows:

1. Open up your notifications pop-up in the bottom right of your facebook window and choose ‘view all’
2. Copy the link location of the ‘Subscribe to Notification > Via RSS’ option on the right of the page (something like – ‘http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=123456789&viewer=1234567898&key=98765432a&format=rss20’
3. Change it from http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=123456789&viewer=1234567898&key=98765432a&format=rss20 to http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=123456789&viewer=1234567898&key=98765432a&format=rss20 and paste into any RSS reader
4. Check you privacy settings – The feed will only display status updates that are marked as being viewable by ‘Everyone’. ‘Friends Only’ status updates will not appear in the Feed. You can set this in your privacy settings, but also on each individual update as you post it.

There are other feeds accessible in a similar manner to this, but for my purposes I’ll not confuse the issue.

For a fan page

MUCH simpler:

1. Paste the RSS url http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=xxxxxxxxx (where ‘id=’  the ID of your facebook fan page – found in the address bar when you view your page) into any RSS reader
2. If you’ve already set up your own vanity URL for your page, you can grab your page ID by logging in and clicking ‘Edit Page’. You’l find it tagged on to the url in the address bar.

And there you have it. From researching this, it appears Facebook have a habit of relocating the RSS Feeds without telling anyone – probably why they don’t publicise them too heavily – so you might find that these stop working in the future, but for now I’m all good to go in my project and hope I’ve helped you with yours.

Cheers,

Neil