Twitter for Dummies (20 page)

Although Twitter can send you e-mails, it has no mechanism that allows you to send updates, replies, or direct messages directly via e-mail. (But they do provide a link in the e-mail that you can click to open pages at Twitter.com [or mobile Twitter] where you can send Twitter info.)

To work around this limitation, some developers have used the API to come up with e-mail clients for Twitter. Two of our favorites include Topify (
www.topify.com
), shown in Figure 8-1, and Twittermail (
www.twittermail.com
), shown in Figure 8-2. Both of these Web applications enable you to interact with users and update Twitter directly from your e-mail address.

As with many third-party Web applications, Topify and Twittermail ask for your Twitter username and password. If you don’t think you can trust a site with your credentials, just don’t use it! Luckily, OAuth holds the promise of letting you give third-party applications limited permission to function with your account without giving away your password and the ability to access everything about your account.

Figure 8-1:
Topify offers enhanced Twitter notifications and e-mail-based replies.

Figure 8-2:
Twittermail looks like Twitter, but integrates Twitter with your e-mail inbox.

Swimming Your Twitter Stream with RSS Feeds

If you want to keep tabs on your Twitter network without logging into Twitter.com, you can use
RSS
(Really Simple Syndication) to pull in your Twitter stream like it’s a blog. Really Simple Syndication is a format for delivering dynamic Web content — blogs, news stories, and multimedia — in a standard, easy-to-read format (called
feeds
). RSS isn’t a Web site or a Web page: It’s a raw data feed for the content on a Web page or Web site. You often find RSS on blogs and news sites, but any site that has live and updating content, including Twitter, can use RSS.

Most modern browsers (such as Safari, Firefox, and later versions of Internet Explorer) have RSS reading capabilities built in, but you likely want to use a dedicated application or Web site to handle your feeds because then you can go back later and search them, refer to them, catch up on many at once, and more.

An RSS reader, such as Newsgator (
www.newsgator.com
) or Google Reader (
www.google.com/reader
), aggregates RSS feeds, which you can then read. Within these applications, you subscribe to an RSS feed, which allows you to access your favorite Web content within a single destination and keep up with frequently updated sites.

RSS is a fundamental part of Twitter because it allows users to share and access timelines from virtually anywhere on the Web, as well as through desktop applications and mobile devices. Each user’s timeline has its own RSS feed, which you can read via an RSS reader.

By the way, the gentleman credited with inventing RSS is on Twitter! Say hello to Dave Winer (
@davewiner
).

Grabbing RSS feeds

If you have a smartphone that has RSS capabilities, you can use that smartphone to get Twitter while you’re on the go. To grab the RSS feed for your Home screen, click the RSS button in the bottom-left of the status window and follow the specific instructions for your RSS reader. If you hover over the RSS icon in your browser (depending on which browser you use, the location of this icon varies), it also displays the feed address. You can then add the feed address to your RSS reader of choice, such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

You can obtain an individual RSS feed address for your Home screen (the Twitter stream of all your friends), the Everyone page (the public timeline of all Twitter users), and your @
username
page — but not for your Direct Messages page. To read direct messages, you have to rely on e-mail, text messages, or another method.

Also, Twitter Search has RSS capabilities built in. You can pull any search that you perform on Twitter Search into an RSS feed directly from the site.

Sending RSS feeds back to Twitter

Twitterfeed (
http://twitterfeed.com
) is a third-party application you can use to send RSS feeds to Twitter so that each item in the feed “posts” as a tweet. It turns out you can accomplish a lot by using this application:

Announce new blog posts.
If you have a blog and want to promote each new post by using your Twitter account, you can have Twitterfeed pull in the RSS of your blog and send the title of the post and a link to Twitter (posting it as a tweet from your account). You may find this feature particularly useful if you update your blog frequently.

Create and share a
link blog.
At Pistachio Consulting, we maintain a link blog of some of the best articles we can find about the business use of Twitter. We use
www.delicious.com/touchbaseblog
to track, tag, and share these articles, and we direct the RSS for that Delicious account to
@touchbase
on Twitter (along with a feed to our
http://www.touchbaseblog.com
posts, too). That way, business users of Twitter can easily access up-to-date case studies, articles, best practices, and ideas simply by following a Twitter stream.

Re-tweet hashtags.
If you’re running an event and want everyone who plans to attend that event to be able to send a message to everyone else, search that hashtag on
http://search.twitter.com
and then grab the RSS feed from those Twitter search results page and feed it into the event’s account. Now everyone at the event can follow your single event account to see all the hashtagged tweets being shared.
Note:
This will work for any search term. Be creative!

Translate tweets automatically.
This one is advanced, but if you want to reach an international audience by sending your tweets in another language and you’re comfortable playing with advanced tools like Yahoo! Pipes (
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes
), you can actually pull in a Twitter stream, automatically translate it into a number of different languages, and then publish the stream to its own language-specific Twitter account by using Twitterfeed. Just be sure to mention on that account bio that it’s automated, or native speakers will wonder why the writing is so awkward!

Limit the number of times that you have to feed send messages to Twitter so that you don’t send too many tweets and irritate your followers. You should also mention in the bio for the account if it is heavily — or completely — automated. See the Pistachio Consulting account
@touchbase
(for our blog and link blog) for a good example of being upfront about RSS-fed Twitter accounts.

Using Third-Party Services

Twitter itself is extremely basic: 140-character updates, nothing more. But the entire world of Twitter is much more complex because its founders created a way for developers outside of the Twitter team to develop tools for their service.

Twitter opened up its service by creating an application programming interface (API), which allows third-party developers to have access to some of Twitter’s code. Both users and developers reap the benefits of this API in the form of fun new toys that let Twitter do even more cool stuff.

Arguably the best-known third-party applications built on Twitter are designed to make keeping up with your network easier. You can easily follow your network on the Twitter Web site when you have only 50 followers, but after you start getting followers into the hundreds, you can have some serious difficulty keeping track of your network without a little help.

Your options for third-party applications that help you use Twitter grow and change constantly; here are some of the current favorites:

Twhirl (
www.twhirl.org
)

TweetDeck (
www.tweetdeck.com
)

Twitterific (
http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterific
)

Digsby (
www.digsby.com
)

Twitter provides a short list of third-party applications right on its Web site at
http://twitter.com/downloads
. The Twitter fan wiki also attempts to index the growing ecosystem of applications, services, and other sites built on the Twitter API, but finding the best ones remains a problem that Laura’s startup
www.oneforty.com
hopes to solve.

Third-party applications such as Twhirl and Twitterific provide more complex, customizable ways to sort through your Twitter network, stream of friends’ tweets, @replies, and direct messages, as well as update your tweets. Some avid Twitter users choose their third-party apps based on those apps’ compatibility with other social-media services that some twitterers also use, such as FriendFeed (
www.friendfeed.com
) and 12Seconds (
http://12seconds.tv
).