Because Twitter is analogous to a river’s flow that you are not expected to watch non-stop, it is presumptive you will miss tweets when you’re not looking. But what about links — those external blog posts, videos, and audio recordings that the people you follow are including in their 140-character updates?
It’s one thing to miss a nonsensical update what someone just did or thought, but it’s something else entirely to miss a link that Tom, Jane, or Bubba felt worthy to include in their stream.
Readtwit attempts to solve that problem by enabling you to receive links from your Twitter friends in RSS.
Two aspects of Readtwit that are endearing to me include resolving URL shortened links, e.g. transforming http://bit.ly/k2heL into http://alive-sydney.whereilive.com.au/photos/gallery/tarongas-baby-elephant/ and removing duplicates.
Case in point: When Patrick Swayze died, everyone was linking to one of several news articles; Readtwit would only include one link from Tom, not two dozen by everyone else going to the same destination. Make sense?
Here is a sample of links my friends tweeted in recent hours:
I’ve used Readtwit for a few days–and enjoy it!
Hat tip to Jolie O’Dell for elaborating the benefits of Readtwit and to Ben Foster for alerting me about Jolie’s article.
Related posts:
- How Unfollowing May Increase Twitter Productivity
- Twitter Lists: A New Way to Follow
- Twitter Meets Your Phone with PocketsApp.com
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
978-558-0008
ConvoTrack
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for telling us about this Ari. I knew about putting some people’s individual twitter stream via rss feed but not about this. I didn’t know about this and I definitely want to follow some tweeple more closely than others. I’ll have to go there and sign up later.
All the best,
Eren
New from Eren Mckay: Overcoming obstacles & failures – instilling a positive mindset
Notice, though, ReadTwit doesn’t enable you to subscribe to Twitter content; only the links.
Nice idea. I follow a lot of people these days and the stream washes over me, especially on days when I actually do some real work. This could be very useful…loading my custom RSS into Feedly right now.
Pretty neat application! I think they branded it very good as well.