HOWTO: Send Twitter updates to your Facebook wall

In this modern day of mashable web services, we sometimes get caught up in what the latest app or web service is enabling us do. All for the simple price of our e-mail address.

Sometimes we just want to do something simple, like have our Twitter updates go to our Facebook wall – rather than using the Twitter Facebook app to pull our Facebook status updates from our Twitter posts.

In such a case, one could easily overengineer the problem. Fortunately, enough functionality is exposed by the two websites to allow us to do this with just the slightest effort.

The first thing you are going to need is the RSS feed for your Twitter updates. You can find it at the bottom of the right toolbar on your public Twitter page. It will look something like this:

You want to get the target for the URL. For most people, that will mean right-clicking on the link and selecting, “Copy Link Location,” or something like that. For instance, the URL for the RSS feed for the updates to the QuantumTom user account is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14244238.rss. If you click on that link your reader is going to try to subscribe to that feed. Hang on to this URL for a second (copy it to your clipboard maybe?).

Go sign in to Facebook then navigate to your Profile tab. Click on the “Settings” link as is shown in the bottom right corner of the following screenshot:

This should open up the “Stories Posted By You” settings starting with the “Imported Stories” section.

In there you should see a bunch of links that automatically import activity from other sites. One of these is for generic “Blog/RSS” activity. Click on that one to open up a text field. Paste the Twitter RSS URL in that field, click the “Import” button and you should be good to go.