Finding the RSS Feeds of your Facebook Status Updates

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 If you are greeted with the message “This feed URL is no longer valid.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


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7 responses to “Finding the RSS Feeds of your Facebook Status Updates”

  1. Tom avatar

    Thanks mate that’s saved me a lot of time researching! 🙂

  2. Gio avatar
    Gio

    Hi, is this still valid or has FB changed something? I can’t find the ‘Subscribe to notification’ link at point 2. Can you post or send me a screenshot? Or do you know where it is now?
    Thanks for your help!

    1. Neil avatar

      This method is still current Gio. Check the screenshot below for help finding the link in question.

      http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php
      notifications page screenshot

  3. Gio avatar
    Gio

    Thanks for your help, but it doesn’t seem to work. After changing to status.php the browser gives me this error:

    “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=.”

    Any idea?

    1. Neil avatar

      Are you pasting the correct URL into the address bar?

      Pay attention to the values for id, viewer & key in the query string, made bold here -> http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=123456789&viewer=1234567898&key=98765432a&format=rss20 – these should be your own unique values, as facebook uses them to identify your account.

      The numbers I have used for demonstration here do not work, and result in the behaviour you have described, as does navigating to http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php with any kind of incorrect query string. The reason that we get the URL of the notifications RSS and change it to ‘status.php’ is that it completes these values for us. If your notifications RSS feed works, then so should your status feed.

      Or at least that’s the theory 😉

  4. David avatar

    Hi. I have the same problem than Gio. I have found my notifications rss feed url but when y change notifications.php by status.php, get the same error.

    Este URL no existe. Da clic en este link, si es que tiene acceso, http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?status&id=100000024540010.

    I have tried to configurate the status updates for see by all people but is showing me the same error…

    Anyone knows why we get this error?
    Thanks!

    1. Neil avatar

      Yes I’ve done some playing and I can’t get it to work for my son’s feed either. Same response as you, but mine andmy other half’s work fine.

      Possibly something to do with the age of the account, maybe?

      I’ll have to amend the post accordingly while I try to find a way to work it from his.

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