How to monitor Facebook with JamiQ

When it comes to social networks, Facebook is as good as it gets. There are lots of people with lots of opinions on Facebook, but Facebook is mostly a closed community where most people's data are only for the eyes of their friends.

However, one very useful portion that Facebook is opening up: status updates. Status updates are short messages (like Twitter) where Facebook users share their immediate location or thoughts. These are available as RSS feeds and can be used with JamiQ. Unlike most RSS feeds, these feeds addresses are extremely obfuscated (for protection). For example, Kelvin Quee's Facebook RSS feed address is: -

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=501905004&viewer=501905004&key=0f8acac8e9&format=rss20

That said, there a better solution.

Using FriendFeed to get Facebook data

FriendFeed is an aggregation service that lets users publish multiple sources of information in a single application. Many users actively publish their Facebook status updates into FriendFeed. FriendFeed's search interface comes ready with RSS. That means you can search for your brand on Friendfeed and add the results RSS feed to JamiQ.

Note: Not all of Facebook is published on FriendFeed, but it's as large a collection as you can get publicly.

To get only Facebook data on FriendFeed create your search query like so: -

[search term] service:facebook

Example:

Apple iPhone service:facebook