Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Twitter feed

A colleague from work approached me this morning to ask how he could have his website articles automatically published to his Twitter account? Firstly, I explained that whilst it's possible, I did not recommend it. Twitter is a social publishing platform IMO so it loses that 'personality' which is counter-intuitive?

Anyway, as an experiment I thought I'd enable automatic Twitter posting from my blog. Confused? The idea is that when I write a blog post (from here) twitterfeed.com will automatically tweet it and include a link to my blog post. Seems simple enough hey?

What I'm curious about is whether you (reading this) think it's a good idea? (assuming you care about twitter). Good idea, bad idea or don't care?
Posted by at 8:57 AM
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7 comments:

  1. Well I followed your link Rob but only because I wondered what the hell you were on about. How many times am I going to do this? Answer: not many.
    PS Hope the ridings going well.
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  2. I have it the other way around.. My Tweets appearing on my Blog. But would be interested in Blogging to Twitter...
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  3. @Mike,

    Thanks for following and leaving a comment here. I thought my explanation was clear, but obviously not :-P

    Yeah, I don't think many folk like the auto-publishing nature of a social tool, but anecdotal evidence tells me some people are turning away from blog feeds and RSS, so there might yet be something in this?

    I'll give it another ~3 posts to see...
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  4. @likeheardingchickens,

    Like you I do the same - feed Tweets to my blog.

    Setting blog tweets is painless - just visit http://twitterfeed.com and set it up. All you need is:

    1. Blog with RSS
    2. Twitter account
    3. Will to do it ;-)

    What I do suggest is pay attention to your follower numbers. If they start to drop then deactivate it.

    --rob
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  5. I guess it partly depends on what is being auto-tweeted. Is it worthwhile, need to know stuff, or just promotional/marketing stuff?
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  6. @fsescribbler,

    Call me a purist, but Twitter is a social tool which is about exploring your (human) interests, opinions, ideas and ramblings. If, however you feed posts from blogs (defined somewhat to this social notion of social thoughts) then I'll accept it.

    My experience with Twitter (as an early adopter), is as soon as I see automation I un-follow. I've not yet continued to follow a auto-stream for longer than a week, unless it's absolutely essential reading I cannot afford to do without. Otherwise, I'll simply subscribe to their email list or RSS feed.
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  7. Interesting that you've dgone and done this Rob... I've just set up a similar thing for my blog, on a trial basis.

    Got to say, it never occurred to me to think that this kind of automation could be a bad thing. I've always gone with the logic that anything that can tie my different social networking presences on the web (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, blog etc), was a good thing, as it means more exposure on the web for me with less physical effort.

    However, your point is taken, and I'll have to have a rethnk about this.
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