Twitterfeed

If you follow my Twitter account, you'll notice that whenever I post to one of my blogs (there's a list of them on the right-hand side of this page) a tweet always shows up. I don't do this manually; I use a great service called Twitterfeed:

http://twitterfeed.com main page

Twitterfeed is a simple service... you set it up with an RSS feed and with your Twitter account(s), and then when new information is added to the RSS feed, the link automatically gets posted to Twitter. I don't limit its use to my blogs, either... I use a service called WorldCat.org to keep track of books I read and movies I watch, and it can output RSS feeds as well. So when I read a book, everyone following me on Twitter automatically knows it! That's just for fun... the best thing is that it helps me publicize my blogs without having to think too much about it.

Something else I like about Twitterfeed is that it allows you to create an account using OpenID. This is accomplished using a nice service called RPX which handles all of the confusing parts of implementing OpenID. If you click "Sign in with OpenID" you'll see this screen:

RPX-powered login screen

 Click the logo of one of the services on which you have an account, log into that service (if you are already logged in, as I usually am with my Gmail account, you're all done without having to log in again at all!), and your Twitterfeed account is ready to go! It couldn't be simpler. I'm planning on incorporating RPX into the redesign of my Guide to Petra Web site, coming up soon. As it is now, people have to go through a series of click-a-link-in-this-email steps to use the interactive portions of my site; this will work MUCH more smoothly!

You can set up multiple RSS feeds with one single Twitterfeed account, and you can actually post to multiple Twitter accounts as well. It also supports some services I hadn't heard of... laconica, ping.fm, and HelloTxt are in the drop-down. I've tested it with more than one Twitter account, and it worked great. You "link" the account using OAuth (basically, you log into the Twitter account from Twitterfeed) and then you put in a "Feed Name" and the URL for the RSS feed. And then you're done! Of course, there are some great "Advanced Settings" you might want to look at:

Twitterfeed settings for this blog

My favorite things to change are the "Update Frequency" (I set it really long because my blogs seldom update more often then once a day) and the "Post Prefix" (which is added to the beginning of each tweet), but there are also some other settings you might want to look at... whether the tweet is the title from the feed, the description from the feed, or both, for example, or whether the "newness" of the posts is determined by pubDate or GUID (if you don't know what that is, try one and see if it works as you expect... if it does, you're good). You also have the option of using any one of a large batch of URL shorteners... I use bit.ly (you can even give it your account information, if you like to use a bit.ly account) but TinyURL is there, and SnipURL, and a couple dozen others.

Once you have some feeds set up, the feed dashboard (which shows a list of all of the feeds you are automatically sending to Twitter) provides some interesting information; link click-throughs are tracked and displayed as bar-graphs. If you use Feedburner, as I do, you can even set things up so that you know how many click-throughs came via the bit.ly (or other service) link, and how many came directly through the Feedburner link. If you are thinking of using Twitterfeed for a business purpose, these kinds of metrics could be very informative.

The only time I've found the service to be anything but reliable was during a recent Twitter outage... but during the outage, Twitterfeed communicated status reports frequently through their own Twitter account. There was never a time during the outage that I felt like I didn't know what was going on with Twitterfeed. It truly is a set-it-and-forget-it situation; it just works, day-in, day-out. It's the glue that connects my social network friends with my blogs, and I've seen more comments than ever before on my blogs in the weeks since I started auto-tweeting my new posts. It's been a great help to me in getting my blog posts noticed!