Plug Your Blog into Twitter with TwitterFeed

April 17, 2009 | Awesome Apps

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

I’ve had a mild internal struggle, ever since I started using Twitter, over whether or not to add updates from The 2.0 Life to my tweets. Twitter’s a funny mix of both intensely personal and completely impersonal, and it’s a difficult balance to strike. Any advice? I’m all ears.

For a lot of people, though, putting their posts on Twitter is a no-brainer, and Twitter is definitely becoming a threat to RSS Readers everywhere, as it’s so easy to find and click links right from within Twitter.

If you’re in the camp of putting your blog posts on Twitter, or any of a number of other social networking sites, Twitterfeed can make that process a whole lot easier for you. I’ve been saving it to use myself, and I think today might just be the day!

With Twitterfeed, you can plug in any RSS feed (use this sparingly, or your followers will disappear), and updates are automatically published to Twitter. All you have to do is log in with an OpenID, which is worth getting if you don’t have one already. Once you’re logged in, enter in the RSS feed, and you’re good to go.

You can choose how often the feed updates – every 30 minutes, once a day, or what have you. Regardless of how often you set Twitterfeed to check, it’ll only update if there’s something new to say. You can also add a prefix (like “New From My Blog”) to every post, and even edit what information Twitterfeed pulls from each update – titles, descriptions, and the like.

The neat, and potentially dangerous, thing about RSS use is that there are so many things that let you create RSS feeds. Facebook, Pownce, and a huge number of other services let you create RSS feeds of your activity, which can be broadcast to Twitter through Twitterfeed.

You could even get an RSS feed of your Twitter account, plug it into Twitterfeed, and set that up with your Twitter account. Then you’d update, Twitterfeed would update, and your Twitter would update again. And then Twitterfeed would updated again. And then the universe would implode. But I digress.

If you’re a blogger who doesn’t want to remember to put mentions of every new post on Twitter, or just want the world to see what you’re doing on Facebook, give Twitterfeed a look.

Just don’t overuse it.

What’s your take on all this? Should we be broadcasting our blog posts on Twitter?

Photo: mallix

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missaup

I agree...you definitely have to keep track of what you feed and where you send the feeds to because your friends will receive duplicate info and probably be ready to un-friend you

David Pierce

Agreed. But I do think there's a happy medium to be struck - I do like hearing about people's blogs, or goings-on. To a point. My hope for social media is that in the near future, or at least eventually, we figure out where that point is, and how to be authentically talking about ourselves and our lives without spamming pointlessly. Fingers crossed, eh?

Linny

Sorry that there's only you and me here David. I think your post deserves more comments as it is relevant to what's happening with Twitter, but such is the way of things these days.

Aggressive marketers/ing has caught up with the little bird like a cat pouncing on his prey. In fact there's one marketer who is self described as "older than dirt" who posts every single action he takes online. I had to stop following as he was taking up all the space with endless postings.

Hope they don't spoil it for everyone.

David Pierce

So on any post with zero comments, WP/Disqus shows it as -1 comments. Other than awful for my ego, this is bad. Anyone have an idea what's going wrong?