Export your Facebook status to RSS, Google Buzz, or Twitter

With Facebook's penchant for constant redesigns, nearly every method for getting your status out of Facebook will eventually break. However, with a new Facebook Application called Status Export, you can now export your Facebook status to a public RSS feed that won't go away with the next Facebook redesign. Status Export creates a public RSS feed on an external site, which contains your last few status updates. Anyone and anything can access this feed, so you can use it to send your status updates wherever you like.

To export your status updates to an RSS feed:

1. Simply install the Status Export application. It will immediately create a public RSS feed of your last few status updates, and tell you the URL.
2. (optional) Be the envy of your non-status-exporting friends.

To export your status updates to Twitter:

1. Export your status updates to an RSS feed as described above.
2. Take your feed URL to a service like RSS2Twitter or TwitterFeed.
3. Use the service to post stories from the RSS feed as Tweets.

To export your status updates to the freshly minted Google Buzz:

1. Export your status updates to an RSS feed as described above.
2. In the Status Export application, add your Google account username. If your Gmail address is @gmail.com, your username is .
3. Get the "Status Export Google Claiming URL" from Status Export. You need to add this as one of your Google Profile's links to get it to show up as you in Buzz.
   
4. Go to your Google Profile page at http://www.google.com/profiles/.
5. Click on "Edit Profile".
6. Go down to "Add custom links to my profile", and put the Claiming URL in the "URL" field, and something descriptive in the "Link name" field, and hit "Add".
7. Buzz won't know about the feed until Google next crawls the page. To make this happen, you can use Google's Social Graph API Recrawl Tool. Go to the tool, and log in with your Google account.
8. Enter the Claiming URL, and hit recrawl. If you see a happy page with a green checkmark discussing inbound links, then the page has been recrawled correctly. If not, check your URL, and the username you entered into Status Export.
9. Now go to Buzz and hit the "# connected sites" link. It should bring up a little box, and if everything worked correctly you should see "www.comsmart.org" under "Connect more sites". Hit the button to add it.
10. Wait for Buzz to fetch the feed. This can take a few hours, as Google only seems to be fetching feeds at regular intervals.

Shaolin Temple Starts Flamewar

[via Reuters] China's Shaolin Temple, which is well-known for the kung-fu skills of its monks, is trying to get an apology out of someone going by the handle "Five Minutes Every Day" (I suppose in Chineese), who posted on some forum somwhere a story about a Japaneese ninja coming to the temple, challenging the kung-fu monks, and winning. Rather than taking the normally accepted course of action to insulting forum posts (ignoring them, or posting back), the temple has instead brought out their lawyers to demand that this fiendish criminal "apologize to the whole nation for the wrongs he or she did."

Guess what I have to say to China's Shaolin Temple:

Once upon a time, there was a ninja who had gone to visit China. He had heard of the skill of the monks of the Shaolin Temple, and went there to see whether they were really as good as he had heard. When he arrived, he challenged one of the newest monks, who had trained for only a year, in single combat, and defeated him. He then went on to challenge another monk, who had trained for ten years, and defeated him also. He defeated monks who had trained for twenty and thirty years, and defeated them also. Finally, he challenged the grand master of the Temple, who had trained for his entire lifetime, and defeated him also. The ninja then went back to Japan, and told of his journy through China.

I'm sure China's Shaolin Temple is very wonderful, and kung-fu is downright awesome. I think their monks probably would stand a chance of beating a ninja. But "zomg an 'internet user' posted a story in which ancient Shaolin monks were defeated by Ninjas!!!!!111111" is hardly a reason to send your lawyer to the Beijing News. It's not a crime, a horrible deed, or even particularly disrespectful.