When I started to use Facebook, I love the site because I can play games and interact with my peers after school. But now I seldom use it for one simple reason – SPAM, especially those continuous updates from Farmville and Daily Horoscope. Although there are a few ways to filter those updates, but here’s a nifty little trick of how to read your friend’s statuses (“What are you doing” Twitter-like part of Facebook) directly from a feed reader like Google Reader or Newswire. Facebook no longer links to the status RSS feed URL, so it requires some tweaks to the URL.
First of all, make sure you’re logged in on Facebook. Visit http://www.facebook.com/notes.php, and click on the “My Friends’ Notes” link located at upper right of the page. Your feed URL will resemble something like this (http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_notes.php?id…). Next, change the part of the URL that says “friends_notes” to “friends_status“. Make sure the rest of the URL remains intact, and copy and paste the URL into your preferred feed reader.
However, there is one downside. The Facebook status updates on your feed reader only display names and not profile pictures. So you’d have to read to figure out who published a particular update.
Besides receiving your friend’s status updates, you can also subscribe to your friend’s links by going to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php, notes by heading to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php, and notifications by visiting this URL http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php.
Via jwz