Software Reference

As the commenters below have pointed out, this technique no longer seems to work :-(. If you know of a way to achieve the same think with Facebook's new user interface, please let me know.

My new mobile phone allows me to subscribe to up to two web feeds for each of my contacts. Twitter makes this straightforward – every user has a feed you can subscribe to in order to get all their tweets.

Facebook, on the other hand, doesn't make it so easy. Here are the steps I worked out in order to get a status feed for one person.

1. Log into Facebook.
2. Select Friends, All Friends from the menu at the top.
3. Click Make a New List on the left. It seems you can subscribe to a list, but not to an individual friend. The solution: create a list but add just one friend to it!
4. Give your list a name (I just used my friend's name) and add your friend to the list.
5. Click Status Updates in the Showing menu.
6. Now, at the bottom of the left-hand column, there is a link named Friends' Status Feed.
7. This is the (rather long) URL I wanted. I added it to my phone, and it seems to work.

This technique might be dependent on my friend's security settings on Facebook. After all, there's no authentication – anyone with the URL could subscribe to the feed. But that's a whole other issue...