Picture the scenario; You update Facebook status often but forget about the little bird which is Twitter. You want to update Twitter automatically when your facebook status changes, but Facebook have banned the apps that allow this to occur! Enter TwitterFeed.com, a website designed to pull RSS feeds and post them to other pages such as Facebook or Twitter.

Now, stay with me here, as I spent ages looking at blogs thinking that the Facebook RSS pages have been blocked, but they haven’t. To access your Facebook RSS feed navigate to Facebook and click on your notifications (“See all Notifications”). On the right hand side is a “Subscribe to Notifications” section, and under that is a “Via RSS”. Uncheck all the tick boxes and click on this link. From there, simply change part of the URL from “notifications.php” to “status.php”. This should produce the RSS feed required.

Now, on TwitterFeed.com sign up and add your copied URL for Facebook RSS feed. Authenticate Twitter and set (in the advanced options) your prefixes, postfixes and update schedule.

And that’s it! Facebook will now generate the RSS of your status’, TwitterFeed will pull them in (checking every 30 mins or whatever) and post them to your Twitter for you! If your really clever you could set up an RSS from your website too, and get that to post to Twitter/Facebook whenever you add a new article!

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So, there are lots of facebook applications out there that claim to download all your photos. However most end up with credit limits or only downloading a maximum number of photos.

There is a relatively new release is a small piece of software. You can find it over at http://code.google.com/p/photograbber/. It not only allows you do download all your tagged photos, but also any of your friends. It’s brilliant for downloading all the tagged photos of yourself, but not so great for downloading individual albums.

For that, I’d use FacePad, a firefox plugin that allows you to right-click on albums and download them all. It’s important to note that facePad will only download the first 20 photos unless you have set the default language to that of your facebook by going to tools > options > addons.

Either way, try it out!

This has been on the minds of my collegues and I for a while now – To develop a peice of software to search through and automatically download all of your tagged photos from facebook onto your PC hard-drive.

Export Photo’s Too does this brilliantly. Install the application to your facebook profile and hit ‘Download Tagged photos’. The application then takes some time to compile a .zip folder of all the photos which you have been tagged in. In the meantime your free to continue using facebook.

After a short while you get a notification explaining that your photos are ready to download. Click the link and you can start to download the folder. It’s brilliant! The only negative is that it’s a little slow (as it’s being ran through the developers php pages on a relatively slow server. The fastest download speeds I was getting was 10Kbps with a folder of approximately 20Mb.

Never the less this is a brilliant app! Just goes to show that the little people can still make killer software too! If I were facebook I’d look towards incrementing this to the iPhone’s version of facebook.

iPhone contact syncing

On January 8, 2010 in Development, iPhone.
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I’ve just updated my iPhone facebook app, and noticed it now has the ability to sync your contacts with facebook friends in order to download their profile picture, birthday and other info to the contact file.

I’ve been able to do this for a while now using an app called myphone+ but never the less this is a good development by the facebook creators. The facebook app is amongst the most used and downloaded app to date on the app store, so I’m sure this will go down a treat.

The only issue is that people who have incorrectly spelt names or are saved with nicknames may not be recognised and consuquently their data not updated. Luckily I have OCD when it comes to phonebook names and have all my contacts named (first and surname) listed alphabeticlly by surname first!

While we are on the topic of the new facebook app, it’s latest update also asked to use push technology. I guess this will bring up pop-ups onto the iPhone much like a text to alert you of new messages, wall comments or image tags.

If you don’t already have this app get it now! It’s brilliant, quick, familiar, simple and user friendly! Good work Facebook! A+