One of the things I try to avoid is the business of manually checking sites. I really don’t do it. It’s a phenomenal waste of time. Even if you only check 1 or 2 sites a day, you may find that automating the process [via rss] leaves you with more free time, allowing you to either check more sites, or, you know, reclaim your life back. I spend 0 seconds a day typing my favorite websites into the addressbar and waiting for pages to load.
The Notifications feed (found near the bottom-right of the page HERE, though it may be more prudent to use the new RSS News Feed Reader app on Facebook) always felt useless to me. Why would I want to read in my reader that someone commented on a link of mine? I’d rather get the email, so I know RIGHT AWAY, so I can converse. So I always skipped over the notification feed for having untimely info. However, that feed contains other stuff you might read on your news feed, such as quizzes, surveys, and other banal facebook stuff. The flaw in this feed has always been that it is half “stuff I want to know the second it happens” and half “stuff I don’t care when [or if] I find out”. The trick is to send the first half to email, and the second half to RSS.
To do this, we need to scrub the time-dependent stuff out of the Facebook Notifications feed, using a 3rd party RSS feed filter such as FeedRinse (NOTE: FeedRinse SUCKS! I would advise finding anything random on the internet over using FeedRinse. It’s unreliable and slow, and doesn’t actually save time.). This ruleset is by no means complete, but it’s a damn good start:
FeedRinse is also good for filtering your “friends’ status updates” and “friends’ links” and “friends’ notes” feed: Remove those pesky repetitive things people repeat every week, MafiaWars invites, mentions of football, particular people you want to shut up but don’t want to friend, and such.
Screw reading by the web! It forces you to read everybody’s stuff with no filters, and it forces you to manually check. You also have no way of storing a backlog — Facebook only goes back so far in the web; the reader remembers everything that happens while you are gone. It also allows you to search everything you’ve read, which you can’t do on Facebook. After seeing a movie I like, I search my reader for that movie. A lot of the results are friends talking about it. I now know who saw the movie, and go and leave a comment. Sometimes people are surprised that I’m commenting on something they posted 6 months ago. “How did you find this post?” RSS, that’s how!
Mood: happy birthday to me
Music: Nine Inch Nails – 999,999 / 1,000,000
January 13, 2010 at 10:28 AM
Yes, RSS is a good thing!!
January 13, 2010 at 10:30 AM
Yes! And this new app:
http://apps.facebook.com/rssnewsfeedreader/
which I just edited to include in my post — may be “promised land” rss feed I’ve been wanting for a long time, which includes everything on your facebook newsfeed — even updates from the things you “fan” but not “friend”.
I imagine this feed will need to ultimately be filtered just like the other ones, with FeedRinse.
However, it is superior in some ways: Like showing a picture of the person next to their tweet/status update.
July 12, 2010 at 10:10 AM
FeedRinse suuuuuuuucks.
For example, in the graphic used on this blogpost, I am using feedrinse to filter out facebook notifications that say “commented on your link” (because I get those in email).
But then they started coming anyway.
A feedrinse RSS feed – an XML file hosted on feedrinse.com – is providing me items I’ve specifically told them to filter out.
I emailed them.
They waited WEEKS to respond.
Guess what they said? It’s google reader’s fault, according to them. Somehow, google reader magically retrieves items that they’ve filtered out from their feed.
Now given that an RSS feed is an XML file, what they are basically saying is that Google Reader is reading an XML file missing some items, then magically deciding where the original feed is and adding in the missing items.
TOTAL BULLSHIT. That’s not how RSS works. For RSS, a reader reads an XML file and converts it into items. If they are truly filtering the items they are supposed to filter, THEN THAT ITEM IS NOT IN THAT XML FILE, so no feed reader should show it.
It sounds to me like they are more or less lying to their users to displace the blame of their failure onto google.
Here’s what they said:
What b.s.! Part of my response to them: