Last year, Facebook began incorporating the ability to add Facebook pages to an RSS feed, but as of today has quietly disabled this feature. Users can no longer subscribe to someone’s Facebook Page via RSS. This feature was also previously also eliminated for Facebook Profiles as well.
A similar action was taken by Twitter last year, when they made it so you could only view the RSS feed by completely logging out of Twitter to view a profile. By disabling the RSS view for Twitter, they were able to favor and promote the proprietary API format of Twitter.
With both Twitter and Facebook now removing RSS links, it makes it impossible to subscribe to a social network via RSS.
It is apparent with these actions, our ability to preserve open standards on the web continues to diminish. Pulling an open protocol such as RSS off Facebook means that now only developers will have the ability to extract data from Twitter or Facebook, and the “average” user will not.
As sites begin to move more away from RSS and toward proprietary APIs, it certainly does appear that subscribing to RSS is dying, as both a subscription interface and as a protocol in general.
What do you think about RSS no longer being available for social networks?
