Facebook opens up your news feed: walled garden falls down

This week, Facebook made a very significant change to what can be done with your data by opening up your activity streams to developers.

What does this mean? Well it provides a number of new opportunities for what can be done with your data in Facebook. Firstly, it has spawned the creation of a new Facebook desktop app which is a similar application to TweetDeck or Twhirl and lets you recieve and post Facebook updates from your desktop. Lovely.

However, one particular developer has been a bit more innovative with what can now be done with your data. Teck Chia has built an application called Newsfeed RSS. What this application does is convert your Facebook newsfeed into an RSS feed – this can then be subscribed to in an RSS reader. By anyone.

ReadWriteWeb point out a number of things that could be done with this RSS feed; put it into a reader; filter it with Yahoo Pipes to display updates from people you care about and, and it’s a big and: publish it to a Twitter account.

Basically, you could create a Twitter account, pump that Newsfeed RSS feed into it, and hey presto: all your friends’ updates, which they think are only going to their immediate closed network, are now being published on the web. Now obviously, I don’t recommend you do this without telling all your contacts, but I’m sure you can see this raises a few privacy and trust issues.

The key here, is that no one would know that this could be happening. People think Facebook is a closed network, but it no longer is. It just goes to show you should be so very careful about what you are posting up on Facebook, and assume that anyone could be reading it.