Monday, October 25, 2010

Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner

I've been using twitterfeed to tweet my Google Reader Shared Items for about a year (via jgordonshares now).

It's mostly worked, albeit with the limitations of Google's oddball Reader shared item feed. Recently, however, I've been concerned about Twitterfeed's understandable need to monetize their service. It's not the monetization I mind, it's that I'm a passenger wherever they go.

So I poked around a bit. I reviewed some services I'd looked at previously, including RSS Graffiti, but they didn't give me the warm fuzzies. Then I learned I could use a services I already know, Google's Feedburner, to tweet a feed ...
I configured feedburner to turn my Google Reader Generated Page feed ...
http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F06457543619879090746%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast
into a Feedburner feed:
feed://feeds.feedburner.com/faughnanreadershares
It took several tries to get it to work. I repeatedly got an "internal error" message even when I provided the shared item web address (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jfaughnan) and let Feedburner discover the feed. Just as I was about to give up, it worked.

The Feedburner version of the Google Shared Items feed has some interesting properties.  For example, my Reader shared item notes now appear as inline text. I can also get odd links to posted notes like this one:
http://www.google.com/reader/item/tag:google.com,2005:reader/item/4ba48c42d43b00ab
From Feedburner it was easy to link the output from this Atom feed to my jordonshares Twitter stream. I'm using the following services there ...
Optimize
- Title/description burner
- BrowserFriendly
Publicize
Socialize - Twitter
I wonder how long this will work, but for now I'm using Feedburner instead of Twitterfeed to post my Google Reader Shared items and notes to Twitter.

See also (lots of experiments!)

1 comment:

Aditya Chadha said...

Curious why you moved to Feedburner, we're committed to sticking around and providing a free version of the service :-)

Aditya Chadha
General Manager, Twitterfeed