2009-03-25

Facebook News Feed workaround and RSS feeds

The new Facebook News Feed is pretty useless because, unlike the old one, you can't filter notifications based on type, nor does it collapse multiple notifications from the same application into one. What you end up with is a long list of notifications from every friend and application each time, and you simply miss notifications that interest you (e.g. x is now a friend of y) in all the noise.

If you use an RSS reader, you can workaround this problem by using an RSS feed where possible. Unfortunately, Facebook only provides RSS feeds for three types of events: Links (My Friends' Links), Notifications (Your Notifications) and Status Updates (Friends' Status Feeds). At least if you set up your reader for those events, you won't overlook them.

2009-03-26: Added names of the RSS feeds for each of the pages in parentheses.

2009-03-27: Noticed that Facebook updates their feeds once every 30 minutes.

2009-06-07: There is also an RSS feed for My Friends' Notes which lists the last note they made. Also added '… and RSS feeds so that I can find this entry more easily in future.

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