Comments on: Updating FaceBook status from Twitter

By: Murat Bişkin

Murat Bişkin — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:21:54 +0000

8hands do it from more then a month
why don’t facebook want the same thing from them?

By: Blake Brannon

Blake Brannon — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 04:50:20 +0000

Kerry,

As you already know, your not alone in this battle. This is the message I got from the same ‘Boz’

Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth
4:40pm August 30th

I’m an engineer at facebook and I’m writing to ask if you would be willing to take down the link to your facebook/twitter status sync utility (located on your website blakebrannon.com). Even if your intended use of such a script is noble (as I’m sure it is), the simple script you have posted on your site is (and has always been) against our terms of service. Said more shortly, we just can’t let people automate aginst our site outside of the platform; it’s a slippery slope.

We’d obviously like to resolve this without disabling your account or getting the lawyers involved if possible, so please let me know as soon as you’ve taken the script down so that our legal department doesn’t get all fired up about this.

thanks,
Andrew Bosworth
Facebook Engineer

To bad. Fun while it lasted. I will just have to stop using Facebook for status. Their loss.

By: Steve Ellwood

Steve Ellwood — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 22:22:58 +0000

Just goes to show that Facebook truly are a bunch of asses – in all senses of the word.

Definitely beginning to bore me…

By: Sophocles

Sophocles — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:17:07 +0000

Nice…

By: Kerry

Kerry — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 08:28:15 +0000

Given the choice between leaving the script on the site or losing my Facebook account and potentially being sued, I’ve chickened out and removed the script.

Sorry.

By: Ben Kudria

Ben Kudria — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:57:56 +0000

How To Update Facebook, Twitter, and Kopete’s Status All At Once…

I have whipped up a short script to update Facebook’s status, Twitter, and Kopete’s status all at once. The Facebook portion of the code comes directly from Kerry Buckley’s script…

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:53:11 +0000

Rather than storing the last saved twitter status, why not simply check the Facebook status and see if it matches the twitter status (or do both). That way, if someone changes their facebook and twitter status through some other means, then uses your program, it won’t change the Facebook status unnecessarily.
For example, when I’m on Facebook, I use a Greasemonkey script to keep my facebook status synced to my twitter status, but when I’m not, I like to use your script. But I have to manually change the twitter_status file before I start it so that it doesn’t change my status to what it already is.

Also, you might reconsider ignoring a twitter status that doesn’t start with a lowercase letter. Anybody who doesn’t use the standard Roman alphabet won’t be able to use this app otherwise, if their status starts with ü, ブ, or в, for example.

By: Damon Kiesow

Damon Kiesow — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 13:54:28 +0000

Kerry -

May be unrelated – but I was having issues with status=previous_status

I ended up setting my twitter_status file to a full path – not relative – and then clearing status and previous_status vars in the script before populating them. Pretty sure that was not necessary – but after those changes it worked.

By: Kerry

Kerry — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 07:53:49 +0000

Hi Damon,

I’ve had some intermittent problems with the script too, which I never got to the bottom of. Glad it’s working again for you now, and that people are using it!

By: Damon Kiesow

Damon Kiesow — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 02:53:27 +0000

Well – whatever it was it went away – the code is working. Sorry for the multiple comments.