Social wrestling: Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Blogger and Facebook

I might be close to a use for Twitter, bringing Google Reader closer to what Buzz should have been, and distancing Facebook.

The most important of these is distancing Facebook. For the past year I've been reluctantly using Facebook. Why reluctant? It's not distrust. I trust Facebook completely. I trust Facebook to lock in my data, and to exploit any information I provide. So while I like some of the things FB gives me, I want to keep it at a good distance. I want to be able to leave at any time, and I don't want to entangle friends in FB's world.

My latest solution is to combine blogger with the misnamed twitterfeed social network routing service. Twitterfeed consumes feeds, and generates output updates to (currently) Facebook, Twitter, Ping.fm (a rival actually), Loconica/Status.net and Hellotxt (another rival). Unlike rivals I've looked at before (Ping.fm), twitterfeed understands and implements Oauth and OpenID. Twitterfeed doesn't Fail by storing my credentials.

Oauth and OpenID are imperfect, but just right for this task. Now the equivalent of my Facebook Profile page is a special purpose Blogger page. I own the blog, I own the posts -- Google Data Freedom means I can even move the blog. That's where I post stories I want to remember, and where I post about albums I've put on Picasa web albums (or anywhere else). Twitterfeed consumes the RSS (Atom, technically) freed from my blogger "Profile" page and creates posts to Facebook with a shortened URL. It could also create posts to Twitter from the same source. (I used to do similar things with the uber-geek-cool Yahoo Pipes, but they have been shut out of FB and seem to be waiting for an acquisition.)

Twitterfeed does all this with modern authentication protocols - I never gave 'em a password. I write my posts using blogger tools and the updates show up, about 30 minutes later, in Facebook (no pubsubhubbub or even ping support yet - hence the delay). They come out pretty well in FB.

In a related experiment I'm using twitterfeed and my little used twitter account to create prefix-tagged tweets from my Google Reader Shared Items. So far I'm just experimenting, but I might find something useful there. (Back when it worked, I used to share the Reader Share feed with Facebook -- see the long list of post refs below for other permutations).

This approach looks promising, but of course Facebook may break it at any time and, sooner or later, Twitterfeed will either run out of money or become part of Google or Twitter. In the meantime I continue to wait for Google to publish a GR Share API (maybe as a special case of a Buzz API, though I fear Google's tweet to Buzz feature will forestall this). Then someone is sure to make it possible to tweet to Google Reader notes.

More to come I'm sure ...


Update: The Twitter feed of shares doesn't really fly. It chops off my annotations, and the link, of course, goes to the unannotated original.

Update 10/26/10: I switch to using Feedburner to do tweet my reader shared items.

See also other stuff:

• Scrape Shared Notes from Your Google Reader Feed into WordPress | DQuinn.net
• How to Post to Twitter From Google Reader with A Single Click ~ Web Upd8
• How to Tweet your Google Reader Starred items
• Unofficial Google Reader API
• Howto: Post your Blogger comment actions on Twitter automatically
• RSS Graffiti Shuts Down Yahoo Pipes Users (Feb 2010)

my stuff:

• FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader (April 2009 - via Feedburner - still works)
• Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Google Reader: Update with FB feed information (April 2009 - Facebook disabled this)
• Google reader shared items to Facebook (March 2009 - Facebook disabled this)
• The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion (Feb 2010 - Google bombs)
• Google Buzz, Chat and Reader - together at last. Farewell Twitter (Feb 2010 - alas, my optimism didn't last)
• Good-bye Buzz – for now. (Feb 2010 - we're still divorced)
• Reimagining realtime focalcast communication – Buzz and Twitter 2.0 - how to fix Buzz and/or Twitter
• What can I do with Twitter, and is it CB Radio redux? - (Dec 2008. I'm still wondering)
• Why Twitter? (Oct 2008 - SMS and RSS)
• My latest take on Twitter (Oct 2009)
• Twitter and Facebook - because feed readers didn't make it (Mar 2009)
• Ping.FM: a router for status updates ... with just one small problem. (May 2009 - no way I'm giving them my google credentials!. I rechecked and they still feel like they're failing; the lack of OpenID support is a give away.)
• Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes (Sept 2008)
• How do I share my Google Reader Shared Items Feed and process it via Yahoo Pipes? (Sept 2008)
• Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes (Feb 2009 - good way to get tagged by google as a splog, alas)
• Yahoo! Pipes: what they're good for (Mar 2008)
• More of me: My Google Reader Shared Item Feed