I have been using Facebook quite a bit in the last year or so (it’s simple enough to have a window open with my facebook page), but I haven’t really gotten into twitter, though I have personal account and one for Derechos, the organization I run. To make things easier I wanted to be able to get my Facebook status to be automatically twitted out. That way I don’t have to tweet it as well. But doing so proved MUCH more difficult than I expected. The problem is that Facebook has now hidden your status RSS (as well as your link rss) and without it, it isn’t really possible to integrate it with twitter. The only way I’ve found out to do this integration is by a “hack” that involves creating a second account. This is how you do it:
– Create a new account on facebook.
– Friend yourself (and only yourself) from that account.
– While signed-in to your new account, go to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php
– On the right hand margin, look for “Subscribe to Links”. Underneath that you will find a link that says: “My Friend’s Links” – right click on it and copy the link. This will give you the RSS link to the links you post from your main account (the one you friended from the one you are currently using).
– Post the url (it’ll look something like this: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/share_friends_posts.php?id=100000716076162&key=2f5385ddb9&format=rss20) to a word processor.
If you would like your links to be twitted, keep this url.
If you’d like your status to be twitted replace “share_friends_posts.php” with “friends_status.php” so that you end up with a url that looks like this:
“http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=100000716076162&key=2f5385ddb9&format=rss20”
– Now that you have an RSS feed for your links and/or status, go to http://twitterfeed.com/ and create an account. Follow the instructions, entering the facebook urls for the feed that you want to send directly to twitter. Note that in the second step you will have to select “twitter” as the place you want your status/links to go to. You will also have to authenticate your twitter account with your e-mail address and password, so that twitterfeed can connect to it.
And that’s it. This hack works now (January 2010) and I hope it continues working – but Facebook likes to be sneaky and disable access to RSS feeds, so I can’t guarantee it’ll work forever.