Facebook Says It’s Not Testing a Feed Aggregator

August 26th, 2009

By Justin Smith

outside-world Since Facebook’s design team posted some before-and-after screenshots of today’s design tweaks, there has been some speculation about the existence of an “Outside World” News Feed filter that has a labs-style icon. Could Facebook be testing a FriendFeed-style feed aggregator so that users could consume any web content inside the Facebook stream?

Facebook says that is not the case.

“Outside World is a News Feed filter just for Facebook employees that shows only non-Facebook employees in your stream,” a Facebook spokesperson tells us.

Facebook has never made RSS reader-like functionality directly available inside Facebook, but when the company acquired FriendFeed a couple weeks ago, it was clear that the companies are thinking similarly about sharing. Today, users can only subscribe to other Facebook users and Pages – but we wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook testing features like this in the months ahead.

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4 Responses to “Facebook Says It’s Not Testing a Feed Aggregator”

Will Robertson Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Well there goes that conspiracy theory.
Ettienne Venter Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Oh come on. You’d have to be ignorant to actually believe this. Why on earth would facebook have acquired friendfeed if they had no interest in aggregating? Friendfeed hit the spot when it comes to aggregation, and facebook NEEDS that in order to move forward.

Facebook is working on aggregation whether they like to admit that or not.
Facebook app developer Says:
August 27th, 2009 at 1:00 am
Facebook.Inc does likes to cover things up so one can think that the social giants are playing games
Korkor Ali Says:
August 31st, 2009 at 4:28 pm
It won’t be that cool anyway !