Monday, April 27, 2009

Wrangling Twitter, Facebook and Blog updates

I've got a number of blogs (why?) and I wanted to hook them up such that new posts got fed automatically to my Twitter account and Facebook status. Here a few tools I've found useful to do this:
  • The Twitter app in Facebook updates your Facebook status from Twitter.
  • Even better, Selective Twitter Status, lets you feed your tweets selectively to your Facebook status by ending them with #FB (kudos to this post for the tip).
  • Yahoo Pipes allows you to combine multiple RSS feeds into a single feed, which is usefule if you are using something like the next item.
  • To feed a single RSS feed into Facebook, under your Profile page click on Settings, then select Blog/RSS and give it the RSS url. This is nice because it will posts things as Noteson your Wall instead of in your status, but it's limited to a single feed (hence Yahoo Pipes is useful to use with this).
  • TwitterFeed can post any number of RSS feeds to Twitter. It even supports OAuth, meaning you don't have to share your twitter username and password (plus you authenticate to TwitterFeed with OpenId, which is cool).
So, what I actually do? The following:
  1. I used Selective Twitter Status to update my Facebook status via selective feeds.
  2. I used TwitterFeed to feed my blogs posts into Twitter. Since they don't have the "#fb" tage, Selective Twitter Status won't carry them over into Facebook.
  3. I used Yahoo Pipes to combine by blogs RSS feeds and then the Facebook RSS function (under Profile/Settings) to display the blog postings on my Facebook Wall.
  4. To update my Twitter status I the Ubiquity built in Twitter command in FireFox (nice post on using this).
  5. I also have started using TweetDeck to monitor Twitter and may start using it to update Twitter.
  6. I also use Bookmarklets for Sharing in Facebook and Noting in Google Reader for sharing random stuff I run into on the net. I'm finding the Sharing in Facebook to be better since the result looks nicer with a thumbnail and quoted text.

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