For a reason I am not entirely sure of, I decided to start playing with twitterfeed today. twitterfeed is a service that will periodically check rss feeds of your choosing and then post new items to your twitter stream.
I started by thinking how cool it would be if any time anyone posted anything at blogs@psu with the psuets tag, it could show up on the ETS twitter account. Same thing for posts tagged with tltsym09 and the TLT symposium twitter stream.
So, I figured I might as well try out this little tool before I get too far ahead of myself thinking of the opportunities. I hooked up this blog's feed to my twitter account.
It worked. Okay, so let's hook up my link blog, too.
Now I was hooked. I just posted content over at the blogs@psu news. Why not hook that up to my twitter account also?
Then the bell really went off. Ding! Why not hook up the comments feed of my blog up to my twitter account? I configured twitterfeed to only send the most recent new comment, checking every 30 minutes. So at most, one comment tweet will be sent every thirty minutes. This blog doesn't get that many comments, so in reality there will be far fewer tweets going out. Although with new comments being fed to twitter, that may very well change.
I have known for a while that one of the most important new features needed on blogs@psu is "email me followup comments" feature when leaving a comment on someone else's blog. Without this, conversations on a particular blog post can easily whither. Well, in the meantime this twitterfeed can help remedy that. maybe. We'll see.
One cavet to twitterfeed: you have to let it know your twitter password. It's really the only way something like this can work. I threw caution to the wind. You may not be as free-spirited. Update: As I was writing this, twitter launched it's oauth support, a more secure way to authorize api access.
brad i just realized the title and subtitle of your blog, so it's hilarious i can't even process it.
You will have 1,000,000 followers in no time at all.
Twitterfeed is very useful; I use it to republish a variety of things from NMC's drupal/wordpress feeds to our twitter account.
Also, if you have any group twitter accounts, I like using hootsuite which lets you give others in your group/org access to post to that account w/o sharing the password. Also, it lets you schedule tweets.
Brad -- this is interesting. How would you say that your mash-up compares to Jaiku? One of the reasons that I like Jaiku (although I'm not sure what its current status is -- Google bought it), is that it intermingles your Jaikus with any other RSS feed(s) that you give it.
Jim, that is a nice feature of jaiku. Twitter seems to be trying to keep everything as simple as possible and not add too many features. I think that is a smart strategy for them. I think they see themselves more and more as general messaging service that other services are being built upon.
Throwing all these feeds into my twitter stream turns twitter into friendfeed in a way.
Ultimately twitter is where the community is at. I have all my followers/followees there. switching to another service seems difficult, even if other services may appear to be better. But it really doesn't matter - twitter is just offering the messaging / friending layer and other parties are adding the user interface (tweetdeck, twitterific twitterfon, etc, etc, etc) and the extra functionality (twitterfeed, twitority, etc).