I’ve played with a number of Facebook applications that claim to let you import RSS feeds into Facebook – and then mysteriously fail to update them. RSS feeds that don’t update are not overly useful.
I finally concluded that if we wanted to import our library blogs into our (currently in demo) library Facebook page, we’d have to use Friendfeed instead. Only when I actually tried this out, it turns out that the Friendfeed application doesn’t work on pages.
So I went trawling through Facebook’s RSS applications again and (perhaps because this was a couple of months since I last tried) found one that seems to work: RSS-Connect(*). It looks clean, the display is reasonably customisable, and it works smoothly and intuitively to open/close items when clicked and take you through to the original item on demand. And most importantly, it really does update automatically – you even get to choose how often you want it to check for updates.
(*) There must be a way to get a link that shows you information about the app before forcing you to add it, but Facebook isn’t intuitive to me and I haven’t found it yet.
ETA 22/5/09 I can’t recommend RSS-Connect, aka Social RSS, any more as it frequently loads either very slowly or (more often) not at all. This leaves me without a working RSS application again. Anyone know of anything, or want to create one?
ETA 17/7/09 RSS-Connect aka Social RSS is back in my good books with some caveats; see comments for more.
If you only want to port one feed, you can use the built in “notes” app.
Thanks! I had a look at that but wasn’t happy with the way it treated the content (iirc it duplicates it without providing a clear link back to the place of origin) and also we were wanting to import multiple blogs.
Fortunately, however, after further enquiries I’ve found that RSS-Connect aka SocialRSS does work as long as you set it as a box rather than as a tab. (Tabs work only very sporadically; most of the time nothing loads at all.) It’s sometimes slower than promised to bring in new blog posts (apparently its creators are considering making a pay-for version that’d be more reliable) but it’s good enough and certainly better than anything else I’ve found.
Thanks, Deborah – this post was great to help me understand the options of importing my two blogs onto Facebook. It was much appreciated!