Hiding Facebook Application Posts

Following a tip from Steven S., I've hidden posts from friends' Facebook applications that don't interest me, resulting in a much cleaner home page. In only a month, I found that I have hidden more than a hundred (!) applications, which led me to wonder if Facebook shouldn't provide a reverse option, to only show certain applications instead.

To hide applications, I can imagine that there is a database query which has a NOT IN () clause that rapidly gets longer. In contrast, to only show selected applications would require a much shorter IN () clause that grows more slowly. From an engineering point of view, the latter solution would provide a more responsive system.

On the other hand, from a business point of view, encouraging subscribers to use applications would increase Facebook's stickiness and the number of ad presentations. If subscribers aren't notified about new applications (through their friends' application posts), they are unlikely to know about these applications.

Merging multiple blog feeds into Facebook Notes with Yahoo Pipes

I started a second blog, Vibogafi, for writing about media, and wanted to display updates from that and this blog using the Facebook Notes application. Notes only allows users to import one RSS feed, so I had to merge both my RSS feeds first.

One aggregation or mashup system that came to mind was Yahoo Pipes. If you have a Yahoo account, then you can create your personal pipes. I followed the video tutorial and got my pipe working the second time around. Some tips and minor gotchas:

• When entering the Blogger feed URL in the Pipes Fetch Feed gadget, you cannot simply enter http://<myblog>.blogspot.com and expect the gadget to find the feed URL; instead, you have to enter the entire feed URL, which looks like http://<myblog>.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.
• Check the Pipes Debugger output by selecting each gadget. If you do not get the expected output, try to fix the problem before proceeding.
• If you just want to merge two or more feeds, just use one Fetch Feed gadget instead of multiple Fetch Feed and one Union gadget; the Fetch Feed gadget allows you to enter more than one URL.
• To use your new Pipe in Facebook Notes, you have to use your pipe's RSS output, whose URL ends with &_render=rss, not just the pipe's basic address. (Upon hindsight, it is obvious, but I tripped over that problem, too.)

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.