Facebook opens up limited profiles

Facebook announced today that very limited versions of profiles will soon become open to search engines and visible to non-members. This is a good thing. It means that Facebook can become, as GigaOM says, the quasi-White Pages of the Web. Naturally, Facebook has put up the proper privacy options so that you can exclude your profile from public searches. All they show to non- members is your name and picture, so there’s not a huge reason to stay hidden, but it’s good to have the option there. I’d actually like to have even more control over what becomes public. The ability to show my profile to search engines along with certain public information (what school I went to, my current city of residence, who my friends are) would allow me to make Facebook my primary profile page online, as opposed to having one on Vox, one on TypePad, one with TypeKey, etc., all with different settings and all of which need to be updated when I move.

One quibble: their little privacy setting box says “everyone” when it means “all Facebook members.” On a page where you’re talking about delineating between the entirety of the Web and just your own members, these things should be explicit.

Putting your Facebook Friends' Updates into Twitter

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:

1. 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.
2. Add your real Twitter account as a friend of your dummy account, and add your dummy account as a friend of your real account.
3. Go to twitterfeed.com and log in using an OpenID (LiveJournal, Vox, TypeKey, AOL, and others are all already OpenID-enabled).
4. 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.
5. 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.

Facebook to Twitter

Here’s a method for funneling your Facebook status updates to your Twitter account. I’d prefer it to go the other way, but it’s useful nonetheless. Not sure if I’ll get around to setting it up. You can also direct your friends’ status updates to Twitter.

Facebook Messaging just got better...

Facebook Messaging just got better…

Do they really want me to use their little message program instead of email? Maybe the kids already do.

Facebook for iPhone

Facebook for iPhone

Nifty little view. Mostly I don't log into Facebook except to approve friend requests, but from a quick glance they did a nice job with the page.

Has Facebook opened up? (Scripting News)

Has Facebook opened up? (Scripting News)

Nice. RSS feed of your notifications in Facebook. Now I'll know how many zombie invitations I can ignore without even having to load their website!

Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up

Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up

It annoys me that I can't link to my Facebook profile without making people log in to see it. You should be able to expose simple biographical data at least.

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

del.icio.us + Facebook

del.icio.us earlier this week rolled out an official Facebook app, which will publish your links onto your Facebook profile. I wasn’t able to get it to work initially, but DrOct found the link to the del.icio.us application, which worked for me once I clicked through a few pages. (The URL has the “wm” subdomain. Not sure if it’ll redirect properly if you’re on a different network, but you could try changing that manually.) I might look into adding my Vox feed on there, too, at some point.

I’m new to the Facebook trend. After Friendster fizzled I gave up mostly on the social network thing, but Facebook seems to have its act together and is a pretty nice platform.

In other web publishing news, there’s a new version of Movable Type out in beta. kwc has written a few things about it, but so far I’ve avoided to desire to tinker. In the end I love tinkering with things but lose interest whenever I have to do too much backend server work. TypePad in the past has gotten that balance for me just about perfect, and now that it supports Markdown I’m much inclined to switch back there. My hesitation is that Vox does so much so nicely, it’s free, and even with cross-posting I don’t like keeping more than one blog. In the back of my mind I’m toying with finding a place to park the frontpage of my domain somewhere free, and just syndicate everything from Vox and del.icio.us to it, which is mostly what I do now, anyway, on david.ely.fm. If Vox were to support domain mapping all my troubles would go away, but I don’t see that happening on such an entry level-aimed service.

There's Twitter in My Facebook!

There’s Twitter in My Facebook!

Twitter app for Facebook.

face hugger

face hugger

del.icio.us app for Facebook.