twitterfeed

Feed your blog RSS to multiple microblogs: Ping.fm and Twitterfeed

April 7, 2010 By Dan Thornton

Popular tool Ping.fm lets you distribute your content to a variety of microblogs and social networks – and it can now include your blog content to be shared automatically.

It’s a real-time feed powered by Superfeedr, which pumps out feed in XMPP or PUbsubhubbub formats. At the moment you can only list one RSS feed, but support for multiple feeds is coming in the near future for Ping’s 700,000 users.

If you’re considering the options for RSS autofeeding, Twitterfeed has been the main choice since the early days of Twitter, and also publishes to other networks including Facebook. In March they announced they have over 500,000 publishers sharing more than 1 million feeds.

The advantage of Ping.fm is that integrating the automation into your regular posting service means you’re perhaps more likely to keep it updated and compliment it with non-automated posts, whereas Twitterfeed can encourage a ‘fire and forget’ mentality, where your RSS feed becomes your entire Twitter stream. One solution to this is to create specific identities for your RSS streams. For instance, I tweet at @badgergravling, but also have @thewayoftheweb, @140char_com and @onlinedriver for each of my sites (Please feel free to follow all of them!)

twitter as feed reader

December 16, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It occurred to me the other day that i tend to read the blog posts from those i follow on twitter – who ‘tweet’ new articles via twitterfeed or suchlike – more often than the others in my google reader (which i check once or twice a week at the most).

Wouldn’t be good if there was a twitterfeed – that i can control – that tweets me selected blogs – from my reader – as they happen?
This would save a lot of dicking about between twitter desktop client and browser/feed widget.
Yeah, this kinda happens with friendfeed but I don’t control that – I’m not necessarily friends with most of the authors in my rss reader , whereas with a custom google reader feed into twitter, spec’d by me… is that bit more personal.

Or maybe this functionality already exists? Any thoughts?

UPDATE: I also posted this over at never get out of the boat theres been a couple of comments if you prefer to chime in over there.

Proving the human element is best on Twitter.

November 30, 2008 By Dan Thornton

A while ago I wanted to test exactly what difference having human interaction makes on Twitter, vs Twitterfeed.

As a result:

If you’d like to see the latest news from Car Magazine: @carmagazinenews

If you’d like to see what Car Magazine’s Associate Editor is tweeting about: @carmagazinetim

Both accounts were set up on the same day, within a few hours of each other. What’s interesting is that @carmagazinetim has 147 followers, to the 130 following the news feed – yet Tim has tweeted 1/3 of the news feed total, skips days, and only follows 32 people. So feel free to message him and encourage him to get more involved!