Dave Winer is getting excited about the increasing use of RSS feeds from within Facebook. As others have pointed out, these feeds have already been in place for a little while now.
So what’s all the fuss?
As far as I can tell, it’s yet another indicator of the portal like nature of Facebook. Let’s take a couple of examples. Everyone is now familiar with FB status updates – if you have an FB browser plug in, these status updates pop up automatically on screen, so you don’t need to be on the Facebook site to see who is doing what. However, you can get status updates via an RSS feed. So all your friends status updates can be viewed whenever you feel like it in, say, Google Reader.
The Notes function allows you to import your own blog posts automatically into Facebook. The RSS feeds here work in two ways – people can get a feed of your blog posts specifically – or you can have a feed that captures all of your friends posts. What’s neat about this is that rather than having to subscribe individually to each blog, all blog posts are delivered via one feed.
"Posted items" are web pages, news stories, videos, etc that can displayed on your FB profile (and using the Share On Facebook toolbar browser plug-in, it is a very simple process to add things) – again, rather than have to check an individual profile page, you can simply receive all these items via RSS.
And if you use Google Reader, you can share stories you think are interesting – using the FB Google Shared items app, these stories are automatically shared with Friends – more generally you can see which stories are getting the most "shares".
In short, simply using Google Reader and FB, it is becoming possible to share interesting info with other people in a very easy way and get all the info you might want in one place.
Interesting times.