Facebook

Use Yahoo Pipes to workaround Facebook’s One Feed Limit

The new facebook looks good. I admit that I wasn’t a fan of the down time, hunting down my page manager, and losing some apps on the profile front page. But the cleanliness and ergonomics make me more of a facebook fan. With the new look comes more security features and limitations.

Last week, I was on a mission to consolidate my online life. I mind mapped all my social networking accounts out, which looked like this:

Eventually, after much nerding out in seclusion, I developed a way to update these sites with fresh content and still make facebook the central hub for connectivity. Facebook is where all the users are, so any other Social Networking and content production should update on facebook as well.

Problem is, Facebook now limits the number of rss feed that I can import to ONE. Definitely a bummer considering I have a lot of content that I want to automatically post of facebook. Here’s a map of my communication stream:

Here’s what to do to work around the Facebook one RSS feed limitation: Make a pipe with Yahoo! Pipes. Yahoo Pipes lets you plug multiple rss feeds into one feed. My facebook profile now receives information from this site, Brightkite, Jott, and whatever else I think of to add later through the pipe that I created. You can use a pipe for other purposes as well. 

We’re inching closer to our blog launch in September, and I have 12 blog feeds that I can combine into one RSS using Yahoo! Pipes. Then, a student can subscribe to all blogs at once. If each blogger updates 2 times a week, the RSS feed will have 24 new items a week. Frequent updates means more consistent traffic and returning readers. Be sure to only provide excerpts in the RSS feed so that subscribers must read the whole article on site.

© 2008 Tim Cox.