Facebook Adds Another Nail To The Proverbial RSS Coffin, Kills Off ‘Import’ In Notes
Bad news all ten of you that actually used this feature, Facebook has changed its Notes settings and will eventually eliminate the importing of blog items via RSS for personal Facebook pages.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook launched Notes back in August 2006 as a blog-like feature built around importing an external feed, so the RSS import being retired now was part of the product's original design. The writing has been on the wall since May, when both Twitter and Facebook quietly killed off RSS support entirely.
The timing lines up with a deliberate strategic pivot: at f8 this month Facebook rolled out the Open Graph, and just yesterday added Listen and Read buttons to Ticker so friends' article and music activity surfaces automatically. Pull-based import from personal blogs doesn't fit a platform pushing frictionless, app-mediated sharing.
First-order effects
- Personal-profile users who auto-published their blogs into Notes lose the pipeline and must post manually or route through third-party tools once the setting disappears.
- Bloggers who relied on Notes as a free syndication endpoint lose their only native bridge from an external feed into the News Feed.
Second-order effects
- Publishers who still want Facebook distribution are steered toward the Open Graph's Read action and Ticker integration, trading an open format they control for an API gated by Facebook's approval.
- Third-party cross-posting services inherit demand from the users the removal strands, since manual reposting is the only remaining first-party option.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major platforms keep substituting closed, permissioned sharing APIs for open syndication standards like RSS, making each network's graph the sole distribution channel for its own content.
- Independent publishers face a structural choice between building per-platform integrations or ceding reach, which concentrates distribution power with the platforms that own the feeds.
The trend: Social platforms are systematically retiring open web syndication formats in favor of proprietary, API-mediated sharing that keeps distribution inside their own graphs.