Feed Theory and Facebook Reality

my original plan was to write a post about how to circumvent facebook's absurd limitation that users are only allowed to import exactly one feed into their accounts. this limitation is obviously fueled by facebook's desire to pull people into the platform instead of using the platform as a hub. my goal was to show how easy it is to engineer around this limitation because feeds are standardized and thus can be mixed and mashed.

after going through the steps of creating a feed from a variety of other feeds, facebook then rejected the feed claiming it was not actually a valid feed (which it was). but after some experiments with various settings and ways of nudging facebook into accepting the feed, they finally accepted it, which means that if the instructions here are not working the first time, try a couple of times and maybe then it works...

let's assume you have a variety of feeds you want to channel into facebook. in my case it's the blog you are currently reading and my flickr photostream. both sources have feeds (blog feed and flickr feed), so the question is how to combine those (and maybe more) into one feed that then can be fed into facebook.

as usual, the 900lb gorilla of the web has something for us: google reader. the process of combining feeds is not entirely obvious, but it is fairly easy. subscribe to the feeds you want to combine (no need to worry whether they are Atom or RSS feeds, google reader handles them equally well). then, in feed settings, add the ones you want to combine into one folder. when you're done with adding all the feeds you want to combine into one folder, go to manage subscriptions and folders and tags and make that folder public. that's it. now go to view public page of that folder and on that page you will find a link to the feed for that folder. this is the feed you have to import into facebook.

all of this, of course, makes all the data you're handling here entirely public, but it very likely has been public in the first place because it has been published in feeds somewhere. but feeding it into google makes it even more public, and you might want to think about this for a minute.

the final challenge is to find the place where to import that feed into facebook, and the most important thing to keep in mind is that in facebook lingo, feeds are notes. also, facebook will make it excruciatingly hard for people to find the link to the original post (it is possible to find it, but it is very well hidden), but at least now all of the feed goodness originating somewhere else can flow into facebook.

Comments

[yiming]

I've been using Yahoo Pipes' "Fetch Feed" and "Union" modules to build a mashed feed, for the times when I need a unified view of multiple sources. The resulting pipe isn't listed in the Pipes directory or your Pipes profile, though if you somehow knew the URI you can still subscribe to it -- as a kind of privacy through obscurity.

It's funny that Facebook assumes you really just want to import one blog feed. If they really wanted be the go-to place for social interactions, I'd think they would want to import everything they can.

[Lukwe]

Tumblr can also be used to aggregate many feeds into one; the worst part of the FB import is not being able to add anything to the rss items... twitterfeed lets you edit them a bit !

[dret]

@yiming: while yahoo pipes in theory is a good platform for this, in practice i have found that the service is very unreliable and may work 50% of the time (maybe a bit better than that, but definitely much less than what you want); the rest of the time the pipe will just fail. not too useful if you want the feed to be available in a reliable way.

[yiming]

@dret Interesting. I have my feed-fusing pipe (5 feeds) on my Safari browser bar for nearly 6 months now, polling every 15 minutes, without noticeable problems. Perhaps it's a function of how many components the pipe is using and how many feeds you're fusing at one time.

[dret]

i haven't used pipes in a while, maybe they have become more stable. or maybe my pipes contained some of the less reliable modules (i mainly played around with pipes having geotagging modules in them) and that affected the overall reliability of the pipe. good to hear it works reliably now!