I linked to a method for doing this yesterday, and wanted to share my experience with it so far. If you have friends on Facebook who regularly update their status messages on that service, and you’re a Twitter user, it’s possible to get those updates out of Facebook and into Twitter using Twitterfeed. The big question of course, is why, and it’s a bit hard to answer, as every news article about Twitter has tried. Basically what you discover is that it’s just fun to get a stream of updates on what your friends are up to. None of them are typically anything ground-breaking, but when your friends are spread all over the world, it’s cool to hear the mundane updates. (One thing about Twitter: it’s designed around SMS, but you can easily turn that off and just get the updates via chat, by going to the webpage, or via RSS. Depending on how often your friends post, getting all their updates via text message can get expensive.)
Twitter does its thing very well, but lots of people use Facebook, which has a similar feature. The instructions I linked to before left out a few settings, so here how to get your friends’ Facebook updates out of Facebook and into Twitter:
- Go to twitter.com and set up a dummy account. Be sure to go into its settings and click “Protect my updates”, as your Facebook friends haven’t consented to you putting their updates out in the open.
- Add your real Twitter account as a friend of your dummy account, and add your dummy account as a friend of your real account.
- Go to twitterfeed.com and log in using an OpenID (LiveJournal, Vox, TypeKey, AOL, and others are all already OpenID-enabled).
- In Facebook, at the top there’s a tab called friends with a little triangle by it. Click on that menu and go to “Status Updates”. Copy and paste the URL of the RSS feed of your “Friends’ Status Updates” from the bottom of the sidebar on the right.
- In Twitterfeed, create a new feed. Enter your dummy twitter feed and password, and paste in the RSS feed from step 4. Set it up update every hour, and leave the setting to post up to 5 updates at a time. Tell it to include “titles only”, and uncheck the box to “Include item link”. Tell it to prefix each post with “FB”, for “Facebook”, or some other identifier to remind you where the update came from.
That’s it. Once an hour Twitterfeed will check your Facebook friends’ status updates and post any new ones to your dummy Twitter account.
A similar method can also be used to publish your own Facebook status updates to Twitter, but I haven’t messed with that. The concept of Twitter is inane enough as it is to deal with two different services that do the same thing. I’d certainly set it up if it went the other way, from Twitter to Facebook, but for now I’ll stick with the Twitter application in Facebook.