My work this week has been an effort to create a multi-user social networking blog site which integrates media from other social networks like Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. With so many of us maintaining individual blogs, websites, news feeds, Myspace pages, and now personal radio and TV broadcast stations it can be a rough haul to try to stay on top of all your incoming and published content.

Each type of social network has carved a unique niche for themselve fulfilling a specific role in our desire to share and communicate. But this same diversity can leave us drowning in bookmarks and leaving content unexamined and unupdated as we scramble to link with others of shared interest and opportunity. There are no time savings here! Sites like FriendFeed.com are a useful tools in pulling all your media into one Activity Stream. Something like 58 different applications plus any RSS feed you want to put into it, to have all your music, videos, blog posts, twitters and chat all on one page.

The site I am working on now needs just exactly that kind of feature, although I'm not up to integrating 58 different input sources yet, I did manage to integrate YouTube favorites, Twitter timelines, Flickr Feeds, Wordpress blog posts and RSS news. I then turned my attention to that grand ol' gal - Facebook. I think I looked under every possible link on my Facebook space looking for that orange RSS feed logo, or any indication of how does one extract that conglomerate of news from one's wall? I read half a dozen articles dated June 2009, yet in every case their details of how to locate and extract, create or hack together an RSS feed turned out to be impossible - and not politely either, a big white screen with and unformatted error message will now greet existing users of feed links. WHAT CAN THEY BE THINKING? Facebook won't let us integrate our content outside of Facebook? This is not a good move.

Well I knew FriendFeed was capable of extracting your Status, Notes and Links from your Facebook page, regrettably not images, video or othermedia,  but surely FriendFeed would show me how to get my status from Facebook. Well guess what? It's now broken there too. No more status from Facebook even from their partner FriendFeed, the amalgammator of all personal social media content.

Here's what you get now:

I visited the Facebook Developer Forums to seek an explanation. I found developers complaining about the sudden removal of access to direct RSS through facebook. With no notice or explanation. There was brief mention of privacy issues, which I can understand after slogging through trying to comprehend privacy settings- just for my base page, thus expecting the average facebook user to understand the implications of permitting their RSS status feed to be live could cause ..complications.  But surely there are better ways of handling privacy issues than cutting facebook off from the rest of the world?

Isolation and content megalomania are not good policy. Expecting your members to be loyal solely to your platform is naive in the long run, force of numbers is on Facebook's side. But in the coming months more and more web denizens with their integrated PDAs and cell phones, laptops and desktops, cameras and book readers are going to be looking for ways of getting the best of everything - and organizing it in ways that makes it easy to locate, share and enhance it, without having it "locked in the box". Bad move Facebook - give us back our RSS. That's our content... Remember?