Back in May Facebook shut down an application that converted your Facebook news feed into its RSS equivalent. In theory it makes a lot of sense but unfortunately Facebook claims that such actions violate their privacy policy. Months later another developer has released an RSS application which displays the most recent stories in RSS format.

The new system doesn’t appear to use Facebook’s Open Stream which makes me guess this one will be shut down as well. It’s unfortunate because this is clearly a feature that many users want. Listening is one of the most important social media activities and the more formats that users have to consume information, the easier it is for them to listen. Unfortunately none of the RSS applications use authentication when a user views the feed currently.

For example I can take the RSS link provided by the RSS News Feed Reader application and send it to others and it’s instantly accessible without any form of authentication. In other words the feed stories have become public and I didn’t need to provide anybody with my Facebook login. Despite Facebook’s open stream policy, there’s still no way of consuming the feed via RSS. Whether or not Facebook shuts down the latest RSS application, the company needs a more effective way of consuming the feed however a user wants.

While developers can create an RSS application and simply keep it private, the average user isn’t going to go through the same complex process. For now we’ll have to wait and see what Facebook decides to do with this application but my guess is it will go the same way as RSS applications of the past: down the drain. Do you want to be able to access your news feed via RSS?