HOWTO: Monitor your Facebook profile in Linux

Facebook is surely the most popular social networking site with more than 150,000,000 users all around the world. In this guide, we will show you a small application that allows you to monitor your Facebook profile without having to constantly check it through Facebook’s web site. This application notifies you instantly when your profile changes. For the time being this Facebook linux client is available only for Gnome users and we don’t know if there is a plan for a KDE version.

The notifications include the following changes:

One of your friends changes their status, profile picture or profile details.
You receive a friend request, event or group invitation.
Someone writes on one of your friends walls.
One of your friends is tagged in a photo.

To run this software you must have the following packages installed pygtk, python-webkitgtk, and python-simplejson. You can find them in your distributions repositories and install them through your Package Management System.

Fedora users open a terminal and type:
su -c 'yum install pygtk2 pywebkitgtk python-simplejson'
Ubuntu users open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install python-gtk2 python-webkitgtk python-simplejson

There is no installation package for facebook-notify. You just have to download the tar package from its official site. Untar it and double click on the facebook-notify.py file. Select “run” and you should see a Facebook icon in your task bar. Click on it a Connect option will appear.

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2 Responses to “HOWTO: Monitor your Facebook profile in Linux”

John K says:

February 25, 2009 at 3:48 pm

Is this a virus? Look at the code:

def _got_friends(self, result):
#data returned by facebook
#{u’status’: {u’message’: u’is fuck Israel.’, u’status_id’: u’42439154725′,

Why is this in the code?

Take a look before you run it.

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Administration says:

February 25, 2009 at 5:19 pm

I don’t know why it’s in the source but it is commented out.

I assume the author was trying to be funny while testing/debugging.

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