August 13th, 2007
The workaround that pipes Facebook status entries into a Twitter feed
Facebook’s status area is where Facebook users can key in up to the minute information about what’s going in their lives or their brains. Twitter is an entire service that’s pretty much dedicated to the same thing. For example: “I need coffee.” Who cares about tuning into this information? Well, that’s a different question for a different day. But for those who want to update the status area of either in hopes that someone is paying attention, there’s a better question about killing two birds with one stone.
In response to last week’s post where I said it’d be real nice if updates to my Facebook status cascaded to my Twitter feed and vice versa, ZDNet reader Dan York (blog) pointed me to Julian Bond’s workaround which involves using Twitterfeed.com. Twitterfeed is a service that can turn Facebook status updates into Twitter tweets. Twitterfeed.com is service that’s not from the folks that brought you Twitter, but that’s for weaving your blog’s RSS feed into your Twitter account (and feed). So, basically, the principle here is that if whatever it is that you want to show up in your Twitter has its own RSS feed (for example, your Facebook status feed), then Twitterfeed.com can be used to handle the rest (it doesn’t have to be a blog). To make it work, you will need an OpenID. I got mine from Verisign’s free OpenID service.
I’ve already followed Bond’s recipe. If it works, you’ll see a test Facebook/Twitter interop entry show up in my Twitter feed (off to the right of this blog page, you may have to scroll up or down to see it). Between the 30 minute intervals between Twitterfeed’s check of my Facebook status feed and then the subsequent interval between the time that my Tweets show up here in this blog (I don’t think there’s a delay since nothing is getting cached up), things aren’t happening instantaneously (so I don’t know just yet if it’s working or not…Update: It works! Update #2: Sort of. OK. Not really for my application… every Facebook status entry that shows up in Twitter starts with “David is”… which won’t work. Also, I have no idea when entering a Facebook status entry if I’ve exceeded the 140 character limit of a Twitter Tweet. *sigh*.).
But, a couple observations are worth making. First, this workaround doesn’t go the other Twitter-to-Facebook status direction (which is what I’d really prefer). Second, in his e-mail York wrote:
A number of us have been saying for a while that Facebook needs better APIs to get information *out* of Facebook. Right now it sucks all sorts of things into its walled garden, but lets very little out. So all you can really work with is the RSS feeds for your status updates and also that of your friends.
In the meantime, going back to my original blog about this idea of Twitter/Facebook integration, the folks at Zude saw my challenge to them to make it happen and they say they’ve got something working, but I haven’t seen it yet. When I do (and I can share it with you), I will.
