I know exactly what you mean: it's always struck me as less than useful for Facebook to have its own events calendar for the meetings, parties and other activities I've RSVP'd "yes" for on the site. I mean, there's already so darn much fragmentation in my data stream, having multiple calendars would be out of control. And, heck, I already have my meetup.com calendar automatically synchronized and subscribed from within iCal, so I RSVP for a meeting there and it shows up, like magic. Darn nice.

So what about Facebook? Well, it turns out that you can indeed subscribe to your Facebook calendar event stream, but it's rather unintuitive to get things set up.

The key is to find an event that you're going to attend, then tell Facebook you want to add that specific event to your own iCal calendar. Then...

Well, let's start at the top. Find an event that you're planning on attending and go to that event page. It'll look like this:

That's pretty shrunk down, so let me zoom in on the top right of this Facebook page view:

As you can see, you want to click on the gear icon, then select Export Event from the subsequent pop-up menu. Once you've done that, a window pops up with a few export options:

What you want is the URL shown on the bottom of the window, so you don't even need to click on "Export". Just click on that URL and most likely your browser will ask if you want to launch iCal:

If you're good with it feeding the data to iCal, then click "Launch Application". If not, "Do Nothing" and reconsider why you're reading this article in the first place. Ah, tricky, eh? :-)

On the assumption that you do want to proceed, iCal will launch and it'll tell you what's going on:

You do want to subscribe, and in a second you'll be able to tweak the update frequency. For now, just click on "Subscribe" to proceed.

Lots of options are shown to you:

Rename it, change the color of the items shown on your calendar as desired, and don't forget to look at the options for Auto-refresh:

I recommend a daily update, and I try to make my external calendar colors match the service that they're associated with, so Facebook gets a darker blue. In any case, once you've clicked "OK" you're done and your Facebook events are now shown within your other iCal events. Very slick!