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ActivityStreams for Facebook and Twitter

I’ve just published activitystreams-unofficial, a stand-in ActivityStreams server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints:

This complements the unofficial WebFinger and PortableContacts providers I published recently. I’ve updated the WebFinger provider to include Link elements pointing to these new ActivityStreams endpoints.

They’re all just little side projects, and may not be hugely useful on their own, but together they’re another step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for more of the major social networking sites.

Feedback and pull requests are welcome!

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8 thoughts on “ActivityStreams for Facebook and Twitter

  1. Great work!

    Would be nice if you added “http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/wiki/CommonLinkRelations” links to the WebFinger files as well which links directly to the ActivityStreams feeds as that’s what most other WebFinger providers currently do with their ActivityStreams as far as I know.

    Also – the “http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0” link relation – where is that defined? I personally find a bit weird that it doesn’t link to an ActivityStream stream/feed as the ActivityStreams specifications doesn’t handle anything outside the format of the streams – it doesn’t really care about where and how it is used as far as I’ve understood. It also usually reuses existing feed relations – eg. rel-alternate with an appropriate type when used in HTML.

  2. thanks for the kind words and feedback! i’ll definitely add the common link relations.

    re the http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/ link relation, i made it up. :P you’re right, it’s not necessarily an official link relation, and you’re right that ActivityStreams doesn’t define an actual API. the root URL of those sites actually is the base URL endpoint for the API, but maybe the opensocial link relation is enough. we’ll see.

  3. I noticed that facebook-atom generates feeds with errors when an entry has an “&” in the text. The “&” character is not escaped and so feed readers attempt to parse what follows as an EntityName.

    Thanks for your work on this!

  4. done. it’s nontrivial, though, so i’m not sure when i’ll get to it. feel free to take a crack at it if you’re interested!

  5. Hi, I’m a web dev but not up on what your facebook atom tool does. I was going to try, but a little nervous sharing my FB content with a third party. Could you please add references, end user description of what it does, etc? I have a low powered android phone I was thinking of using instead of the heavier Android Facebook app. Thank you!

  6. hi shane! sounds like you’re talking about https://facebook-atom.appspot.com/ . it just translates your facebook news feed, ie the stream of posts from your friends, into atom format so you can read it in a feed reader instead of the facebook web site or app.

    as for privacy, i’m the only one with access to the app, and i don’t look at users’ data.

    good luck, and enjoy!

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