I explicitly try to use Facebook without visiting Facebook, and the notifications RSS feed is the only feed that still works (they retired all the others). So w

I explicitly try to use Facebook without visiting Facebook, and the notifications RSS feed is the only feed that still works (they retired all the others). So without cranking your own oAuth based app, or scraping the HTML, it's all you've got. To make matters worse, the feed itself seems to be delayed on some sort of random variable, making it useless for timely alerts.