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Anne Dorko

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Facebook Status RSS feed: How to find it, and what to do with it

Posted on 27th January, by Anne in Web, Web Apps. 38 Comments

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Today, I discovered Wordle. It’s this neat app that allows you to create beautiful word clouds using custom text input, an RSS feed, or your Delicious account. Well, I wanted to input my Facebook status feed, but alas – I could not find it!

After a little research, I finally found a useful post about finding your Facebook Status RSS feed at Tech Life Web, and I wanted to share my findings with you guys.

*** UPDATE 6/22/2010: Thanks to Shirish, I have learned that this only works if you’re a long time Facebook user. If these instructions aren’t working for you, it may be because you were late to the party!

*** UPDATE 6/24/2011: It would appear there’s some Facebook apps available to provide this functionality if you search for them. Anyone want to try them out and report back how they work for you?

Get the notifications RSS feed

Go to your notifications page: facebook.com/notifications.php

At the bottom of the right hand column you will find a little blue RSS icon with the words “Your Notifications” next to it.

Clicking on that link should take you to your Notifications RSS feed.

Getting your status RSS feed

Now for the tinkering. Your link will look something like this (the X’s represent numbers, which will NOT change):

[html]http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=XXXXXXXXX&viewer=XXXXXXXXX&key=XXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20[/html]

You will take your link, and change the word “notifications” to “status”.

[html]http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=XXXXXXXXX&viewer=XXXXXXXXX&key=XXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20[/html]

That is your status RSS feed.

If you’re one of the people who can’t access that link, try changing the “www” before facebook.com to “apps”, and see if that works for you.

Making the status feed pretty

Right now it probably reads awkward because it will say your name in front of all your updates. If you want to get rid of that, head on over to the Yahoo Pipe Facebook Status RSS Feed Filter.

Copy and paste your status RSS into the text input box and hit “Run pipe”.

Once it is finished, you should see your pretty statuses in the bottom section. To access this as an RSS feed, click the “Get as RSS” link.

You’re done!

If you found this post useful, please follow me on Twitter or Facebook!

If you want to have some fun, head over to Wordle to create your very own word cloud with your statuses. My statuses aren’t too interesting, but here’s what I got:

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38 Responses to “Facebook Status RSS feed: How to find it, and what to do with it”

  1. George says:
    February 19, 2010 at 9:11 am

    This does not work. It used to work last year, but no longer.

    Reply
  2. Zach Perkins says:
    May 11, 2010 at 6:46 am

    This does not work anymore. When you do this you get a page with the following text: 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=XXXXXXXX

    Reply
    • Anne Dorko says:
      May 11, 2010 at 1:55 pm

      Maybe it’s just me, but I still have access to the status.php page. I believe you must not be following the instructions exactly. If you miss any of the parameters it will give you that error.

      Reply
      • Shirish says:
        June 22, 2010 at 10:15 am

        Hi Anne,
        Zack is partly right. This doesn’t work for everyone. I discovered this TODAY by myself (a late boomer) and was so excited I asked all my friends to give it a try. Apparently, it only works for the old Facebook users. Most of the newer users (with larger “id” values) cannot access their status updates via RSS.
        Maybe it’s Facebook’s way of thanking us for being with them :P
        Or maybe we’re the unfortunate ones. Anyone who gets the “key” value right, gets access to our Status updates (regardless of our privacy settings).

        Reply
        • Todd Van Hoosear says:
          June 16, 2011 at 10:43 am

          Looks like they’re slowly squeezing access to this feed even for the older folks. This solution used to work for me, now it doesn’t. Has anybody tried changing permissions to their profile to see if that works? If so, which permissions?

          Reply
  3. John Corsaut says:
    May 20, 2010 at 11:26 am

    For the huge amount of time that I’ve spend researching how to bring in a simple RSS so that my client’s site (www.myrighttime.com/blog) can see the Facebook posts, you’d think the answer would be more clear. All I want to do, is display the client’s WALL posts (www.facebook.com/myrighttime) …I’ve tried it all – nothing works correctly. Twitter was a cake walk – facebook is a cake in my face…anyone know how to do this correctly?

    Reply
  4. XtinaS says:
    June 2, 2010 at 10:18 am

    Steps I followed:

    * Go to this URL: http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php
    * Right-click on the “Via RSS” link, and copy the link.
    * The link: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=#########&viewer=#########&key=##########&format=rss20
    * Replace “notifications.php” with “status.php”.
    * Try going directly to the new link. (Firefox does that feed-parsing thing, so.)

    Result:

    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=#########.

    That link is completely meaningless to Google Reader, alas.

    It might be that some folk have access to that, and some don’t. This isn’t surprising, given how insanely large Facebook is. Might be a “We haven’t removed that functionality on all servers yet” thing.

    Reply
  5. XtinaS says:
    June 2, 2010 at 10:21 am

    I forgot to mention: it’s meaningless because minifeed.php &c &c just redirects to the profile.

    Reply
  6. Terran says:
    June 8, 2010 at 11:28 am

    Nope, doesn’t work for me either, and I’ve double-checked all of the URL parameters.

    Reply
  7. megan says:
    June 22, 2010 at 8:22 am

    Go to your notes section on Facebook and click “Subscribe”. Then, when you’re in the RSS reader, simply change the part that says “notes.php?” to “status.php?”. This will not show wall updates through Twitter or posts by others, though. I think there is a way to do it, but your privacy settings must be lower.

    Reply
  8. philly says:
    July 2, 2010 at 11:03 am

    This only works for all the pages that are old.. I joined in 06, it worked for me… I did the exact same instructions for my friend who joined a few months ago, and it doesn’t work…. Go figure.

    Reply
  9. GyeBen says:
    August 9, 2010 at 2:08 am

    I FOUND THE SOLUTION!!!

    I signed up on Facebook in this year, and with this solution
    I can feed my friends’ statuses into my RSS Reader.

    Follow the instructions on these pictures:
    http://awesomescreenshot.com/0613iy74
    http://awesomescreenshot.com/0c43j7ba

    Reply
  10. Stacy says:
    August 17, 2010 at 12:25 pm

    Changing “notes” to “friends_status” works but not for my own status.

    Reply
  11. Stacy says:
    August 17, 2010 at 4:05 pm

    The friends status RSS page only shows 1 post even though I’ve been working on this for hours and have received more updates. If it worked properly then I could just make a dummy profile and friend myself of course. ( And cross my fingers that facebook doesn’t redirect this page yet again)

    Reply
  12. Zakir says:
    November 1, 2010 at 4:50 pm

    its working for me.

    Reply
  13. Christian Longe says:
    November 2, 2010 at 2:15 pm

    It worked for me. Why doesn’t facebook publish this link somewhere usable. It can’t be a privacy thing because they do provide it.

    Reply
  14. Kathleen Scanlon says:
    November 21, 2010 at 8:07 am

    Try inserting “new” after www. :

    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=XXXXXXXXX&viewer=XXXXXXXXX&key=XXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20

    change to:

    http://www.new.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=XXXXXXXXX&viewer=XXXXXXXXX&key=XXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20

    Reply
  15. Ahmad says:
    November 21, 2010 at 12:25 pm

    I want to get a feed of My Friend’s status. And by changing ‘notes’ to ‘status’ shows the status updates of friends of my friend!
    Well, it works, whatever it gives, after so many failed tries.

    Reply
  16. Adam says:
    December 7, 2010 at 4:03 am

    Hi,

    I got this to work, but it only displays 6 items – how can I load more?

    Thanks

    Reply
  17. woodsy says:
    December 11, 2010 at 5:37 pm

    This works!
    Go here.http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?friends#!/notes.php?recent

    Click subcribe to feed then url should look like this below.
    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_notes.php?id=100001548088591&key=064ad2ffc5&format=rss20

    Change friends_notes to friends_status in the url and hit go to in address bar.It should take you here

    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=100001519088191&key=064ad25hc5&format=rss20

    Then click on subcribe to feed.

    You can subscribe to notifications here

    http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php?

    Hope this helps it took hours to figure it out but works well!

    Reply
    • Karen says:
      July 1, 2011 at 5:51 pm

      Thank you! This worked for me – the feature had disappeared a few weeks ago, but now I can rss my friends’ status updates. You rule! :-)

      Reply
  18. River Recycled » The good and bad at Facebook » The Same River. Twice. says:
    January 4, 2011 at 12:09 pm

    [...] want to play nice and just give you RSS feeds for a user’s status updates. Used to be you could do that, but not so much any longer. It appears you may be able to generate a status feed using the Graph [...]

    Reply
  19. Gotcha says:
    February 6, 2011 at 1:10 pm

    It is also not working for me!!!
    THE http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php is working, but doesn’t work any more if i change It to “status.php”

    Why????????

    Reply
  20. gonkyouka says:
    March 17, 2011 at 11:41 pm

    This seems not to work anymore with the new facebook. Anyone knows a new solution?

    Reply
  21. MB says:
    April 5, 2011 at 4:14 pm

    Thanks so much for posting this. For the life of me, I wasn’t able to get my Facebook status RSS feed.. =)

    Reply
  22. Jenny says:
    May 2, 2011 at 7:26 am

    Worked for me, great job!
    (I’ve had my Facebook account since 2005)

    Reply
  23. risdiyanto says:
    May 24, 2011 at 3:00 am

    it doesnt work,..

    Reply
  24. suzana66 says:
    June 2, 2011 at 5:57 am

    Any idea how I can convert facebook fan page status updates to RSS?

    Reply
  25. Bubble Bags says:
    June 22, 2011 at 9:14 am

    Here is the fix! Use this application. What a pain in the behind, I have been trying to get my status feed all morning. Hope this helps someone else a couple hours of searching around.

    App called FBRSS

    http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=122649761132929

    Reply
  26. Raine says:
    January 31, 2012 at 6:47 pm

    THANK YOU!!! Finally something that I got to work.

    Reply

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