Automatically back up your Facebook Status Updates

[update below about Facebook app that shows old status updates]

I like the idea of using my Facebook Status Updates as a miniature journal, but unless you want to copy and paste them out, it’s tough to archive them. Until now! You can now automatically get every status update emailed to you for easy backup with a few semi-easy steps.

1. Find the RSS feed address for your status updates. This is the hardest part. This url will be something along the lines of http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=[your_id]&viewer=[your_id]&key=[special_key]&format=rss20

For some reason, Facebook is constantly trying to keep people from finding this information, but this blog has up-to-date instructions for getting this address. Basically you find the “notifications” rss url, then change the filename from “notifications.php” to “status.php”.

If you have a Facebook ID larger than 1 billion (what, you weren’t one of the first billion people who signed up on Facebook?) this solution generally doesn’t work. Instead, you can have a friend create a new friend list with just you in it, then find the RSS feed for status updates for his friends in that list.

The friend will need to go to his Notes application ( http://www.facebook.com/notes.php ) click on the “My Friends’ Notes” link on the right and replace “friends_notes.php?” with “friends_status.php?”. That will show all of his friends’ status updates. To show just your list’s, you have to add “&flid=[list_id]” to the url. He can find the list id by hovering over the list and copying the number that comes after “filter=flp_” — for example, in “http://www.facebook.com/friends/?filter=flp_84188095862”, the list id would be “84188095862”.

Confused yet? The final url should look like this. http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=[his_id]&key=[his_special_key]&format=rss20&flid=[list_id]

Okay, that was a pain, but here comes the easy part.

2. Give this address to an RSS-to-Email web service. This will turn your RSS feed into a daily email to you. I recommend Feed My Inbox — it’s simple to set up and I haven’t seen any spam from them, just the email updates that I’ve requested. For easier auto-archiving once you get this into your email, you can add a bogus keyword to the email address that you give to Feed My Inbox, like this: youraddress+facebookarchive@yourdomain.com. It really works, try it!

3. (Optional) Set up a rule that automatically archives the emails from Feed My Inbox. This way you don’t have to see them every day, but you’ve got them in your archives when you want to go back and look at them.

Update: Since I originally wrote this post, I have written a Facebook app that pulls out all of your (or your friends’) recent status updates, along with giving some basic statistics about how often you add new status updates. You just copy and paste out the ones that you want to archive.   It’s called Catch Up with a Friend and can be found at http://apps.facebook.com/catch_up/.   So now you’re covered going forward, and in the past.