What is feed my face?

Think of it like this: if you want a good Cornish Pastie, you'd go to the West Cornwall Pasty Co. before you went to Tesco, because companies that specialise tend to be better than ones that try to do everything - Jack of all trades and what have you. Facebook does social networking like nobody else, but when it comes to uploading your photos, say, you might prefer something like Flickr. But if all you ever do is upload to Flickr, how will all of your socially networked friends on Facebook find out when you've uploaded new pictures?

feed my face aims to solve all that by taking feeds from whichever site you want (and thankfully, all the trendy Web 2.0 sites produce standardised RSS/Atom feeds) and importing them straight into Facebook using their handy API.

What are feeds?

Most trendy new sites allow you to get hold of a list of what's going on in a standard format, most commonly Atom or RSS. There's now all sorts of software out there that will read these feeds and automatically let you know when things happen, like when people post to their blog or when news articles are posted. They'll often also allow you to narrow down the contents of your feed, so that it will only show your own activity, such as a list of your most recent photos.

What feed suppliers are supported?

Here are a few sites that we have tested with feed my face, by category:

Photo Uploading:

What future plans for expansion do you have?

We hope to add support for more and more feed types over the coming weeks and months. Here are just a few ideas:

Blogging:

Social Bookmarking:

Why aren't my photos being picked up?

To give you greater control over which photos you want us to upload, we'll only upload photos which have the special tag 'facebook:album=album_name'. You can assign tags to photos when you upload them through Flickr. The value of 'album_name' will determine which Facebook album each photo gets assigned to.

Why are my photos being uploaded more than once?

There are two possible reasons for this:

  1. Facebook will only tell feed my face about photos which you have approved from within Facebook. Make sure you approve all of the photos in your feed before returning to feed my face.
  2. feed my face appends a short message to the description of each photo it uploads to Facebook, to remind itself where the photo came from. If you remove these messages then feed my face won't be able to tell that the photo has already been uploaded.

Flickr only seems to support RSS feeds, but feedmyface takes Atom feeds. What gives?

The link that Flickr gives you at the bottom of your photostream page takes you to an RSS 2.0 feed, which at the moment isn't much good for feed my face. However, with a little bit of URL manipulation you can get an Atom feed very easily - simply change the bit that says 'rss_200' to say 'atom'. RSS 2.0 support should be coming soon, however.

I've got problems/suggestions - how can I contact you?

feed my face is brand new and probably has lots of bugs in it, so feel free to get in touch with your queries or comments. Our email address is: feedmyface at feedmyface dot net.