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 ... Read More »]]>

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!

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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: