a couple of updates to facebook posts

This is just a brief post to inform you of a couple of updates to the Facebook posting functionality:

• there was a Facebook bug which meant that some users couldn’t authorise posting to their Page(s) correctly, resulting in “200 Permissions” errors when we tried to post to these Pages. If you still see this error in your dashboard (click “view” to see the status line near the top), please edit the feed and re-authorise the page, it should then start working.
• we updated the format we post to Facebook to take advantage of Facebook’s features – so rather than just posting a text string with an appended link, we post title/link/description in a way that fits better with Facebook, see an example screenshot below. Note that the text “twitterfeed blog:” you can see in that screenshot is taken from the “Post Prefix” textbox under the “Advanced Settings” of your feed. So if you want to have some text appear at the top of every post, make sure you edit the feed and enter whatever info you want to appear as the “Post Prefix”.

 

Twitterfeed is growing up

Twitterfeed has grown pretty fast since its early side project days. There are now 350,000 publishers from the White House to CNN to John Cleese pumping out almost 600,000 feeds and generating around 5,500,000 clicks to your sites every day.

Faster, more reliable publishing

Dealing with such a flood of traffic on a service meant that Twitterfeed has had reliability issues; at times the system would simply get overwhelmed. Over the last few months we’ve been building a completely new architecture designed to handle the millions of posts we publish to Twitter and beyond each day.

We’re starting to roll out this new architecture today and this means that Twitterfeed should be able to publish feeds much faster than before. It will take a few days for us to move all the feeds over safely, but the result will be your posts reaching your audience when you want them to.

Pubsubhubbub real-time feed publishing

Twitterfeed now works with Pubsubhubbub. This means that sites enabled with Pubsubhubbub, like Typepad and Blogger sites, will be able to see their posts published in real time! We’ll shortly be announcing support for RSScloud too, so that wordpress sites can also be published in real time. You can find out more about pubsubhubbub here.

Publish to Facebook!

You can now automatically publish to Facebook from Twitterfeed. What’s more, you’ll see statistics for each post showing you just how many people clicked on posts from Facebook vs those from Twitter. You’ll be able to better understand just where your social media strategy is working.

Google Analytics Integration

Twitterfeed now adds special ‘UTM’ tags to each post that it publishes. Google Analytics can read these tags and integrate the information into its reporting. You’ll be able to understand how people clicking on your posts from Facebook differ from those clicking from Twitter and track the complete path of their visit to your site.

We hope you like the improvements and new features; you should log in and see how Twitterfeed can help your content spread across the social web!

Very best,

Mario, Tony and the Twitterfeed team

get reminded of your OpenID through our @twfeed account

One of the most frequent questions we are encountering is from users who have forgotten the OpenID they used to set up a feed, and don’t remember how to login to twitterfeed to edit their existing feeds. In order to automate these requests, we have added some automated direct message functionality to our @twfeed twitter account:

• if you follow @twfeed on twitter, the account should automatically follow you back within an hour or so
• once @twfeed is following you back, you can send it a direct message (not a public message starting with “@twfeed “, this won’t work, the bot only responds to direct messages)
• the content of this direct message should be “reminder” (without the quotes) – just that one word, nothing else, or it won’t be picked up by the automated service
• @twfeed will then search for any OpenID accounts that contain feeds posting to your twitter account, and send you back a direct message with the details

Note this only works for OpenID accounts, not for twitterfeed accounts that used an email address to sign up, but then we assume you can remember your email – the queries we got over the last few weeks were almost exclusively questions about forgotten OpenID accounts.

You can of course continue to send any other support questions to @twfeed, ideally as public messages addressed to @twfeed rather than direct messages, and they will be reviewed manually as before.

If you find any problems with this new automated functionality, please as usual report it at http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed.

Moving to bit.ly as default

Twitterfeed users who haven’t specified a preference for a particular URL-shortener will notice that instead of using tinyurl as our default shortener, we are using bit.ly. There are a number of reasons why we believe this change will benefit all our users:

Greater stability: Bit.ly has taken great pains to have a stable service, building in multiple layers of redundancy so that bit.ly short urls can always resolve to their destination pages. Twitter recently also moved to bit.ly as its default and it made sense for Twitterfeed to also use the market-leader in this space.

Rich Analytics: Making bit.ly the default also means that Twitterfeed users can access bit.ly analytics and get far more information about what is happening to their posts once they are fed to Twitter. We’ll be working closely with the bit.ly team to develop richer analytics that give you the information you need to optimize how you interact with Twitter.

If for some reason, you would rather use another url-shortener you can still use the service of your choice, simply by changing your settings. However, we would strongly recommend that you use bit.ly to get the most out of Twitterfeed as we go forward.

Survey Winner

We’d also like to thank all of you who participated in our survey. We greatly appreciated your feedback and have chosen a random winner for the Amazon certificate: @cupcakeartist

Congrats! We’ll be getting in touch to deliver your prize.

Welcome to the brand new Twitterfeed!

Six weeks or so ago, Betaworks and TAG invested in Twitterfeed and the service went from a side project to a company. Since then, we’ve been working flat out to make the service far more robust and create some new features that we hope you will love. So what does this mean?

Much greater reliability

We’ve almost completely rebuilt the back end over the last month and added a lot more capacity. We’re confident that this should largely solve the problems that have occasionally meant Twitterfeed hasn’t published a post on time. What’s more, this will give us a great basis for building an even stronger, faster Twitterfeed in the near future!

New ways to sign up/sign in

Twitterfeed has previously exclusively used OpenId for its login process. Now you’ll also be able to login with a traditional username/password system as well as your Google, Yahoo and AOL accounts. This will give you much greater flexibility on how you choose to sign up. We’ve also worked on the design of the site to make creating and tracking feeds much simpler and more intuitive.

Analytics!

We’ve built a feed dashboard that shows you analytics on all your posts. Thanks to bit.ly you’ll be able to see just how many people have clicked on your link through twitterfeed. What’s more, if you are also using feedburner for your traditional distribution and have enabled their awareness api, then you’ll be able to benchmark your social distribution through twitterfeed against more traditional distribution through RSS readers.

no more twitter passwords… support for OAuth beta

I’ve been working on twitterfeed support for twitter’s OAuth beta for a while, and am pleased to say that the first version of this is now live.

What this means for you is that in order to allow twitterfeed to post updates to twitter on your behalf, you don’t need to let us know your twitter password anymore. To illustrate how this now works, here’s the 2 most likely scenarios:

Creating a new feed:

After clicking on “Create new feed”, instead of the twitter username/password fields you’ll now see this:

Clicking on “Authenticate at twitter” will take you to a page on the twitter servers, looking something like this:

If you’re not already logged in to twitter, the page will display the login prompt to login to the twitter account. Also note that if you own multiple twitter accounts, and want to post a feed to a different account from the one you’re currently logged in as at twitter, click on the “sign out” link on this page before proceeding.

Once you click on the “Allow” button, you’ll be taken back to the new feed page on twitterfeed, which now should display something like the below, and you can continue setting up the feed (i.e. specifying feed URL and selecting the options etc.) as normal.

Editing a feed (moving from passwords to OAuth):

You will probably want to move your existing feeds, which have been set up with twitter username/password, over to OAuth. Although this is not required (and existing feeds set up using username/password will continue to work), it’s certainly highly recommended, as it’s safer, and means you can change your twitter password without having to update your feed settings in twitterfeed. To do this, simply click on the edit link of your feed under “my feeds”:

(the edit link is the “pencil” icon under the “Actions” header)

You’ll now see this prompt:

When you click on “Use OAuth”, you get the same option you can see above, when you create a new feed, and go through the exact same process. Once it’s all done, click on “Update” to save the feed settings.

One nice thing is that if you have multiple feeds posting to a twitter account, you only need to do this for one feed – once a feed has been linked to a twitter account via OAuth, any other feeds in your twitterfeed account that post to the same twitter account will automatically use OAuth rather than the username/password.

Known issues:

• twitter OAuth support is in beta, and is not a final release, so things can sometimes break. I have left in the option to use username/password authentication in case someone has insurmountable problems with any aspect of OAuth. At the same time, if you do have problems with OAuth, I’d be very interested to know, so please report any issues you find at http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed
• the OpenID reminder and feed transfer pages aren’t working if you set up your feed with OAuth (simply because these pages use the twitter username/password combination to find your OpenID, and with OAuth I don’t have this information anymore). I’m working on a way around this – it looks like there is a feature being worked on in the twitter OAuth implementation that may let me check authentication rather than re-authorize. As soon as this is a little more settled I’m hoping to have a reminder and transfer page ready which also uses OAuth to confirm the twitter account ownership.
• the twitter OAuth implementation currently only allows one valid token per twitter account and application. This means that you should have all feeds posting to a given twitter account within one twitterfeed OpenID account, because I store the tokens on a per-twitterfeed-user basis. This is quite unlikely to be a problem for many users, but if you’re likely to have set up multiple feeds to the same twitter account using multiple OpenIDs, it’s best to consolidate them before moving them to OAuth. You can do this simply by logging in to twitterfeed and then go to https://twitterfeed.com/transfer to move all feeds posting to a given twitter account to the OpenID you’re currently logged in as.

Digg support, Brazilian shortener, and all sorts of other awe.sm-ness

As of today, twitterfeed supports a number of additional URL shorteners:

• support for Digg’s new DiggBar, making it easier to get your content “dugg”
• if you’re in Brazil, I’m told you’ll like the fact that you can now use migre.me in twitterfeed
• support for short.ie, kl.am, rly.cc and trim.li/nk
• dot.tk turns your twitterfeed links into domain names
• and last but not least, support for awe.sm (currently in closed beta, but if you’re a publisher that’s part of the beta, twitterfeed is ready for you to use with awe.sm)

As always, please let me know of any issues you find with these new features, preferably by posting at http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed.

Guy Kawasaki on his use of twitterfeed

Guy Kawasaki was keynote speaker at the SES conference in New York this week and spoke about his (controversial) use of twitter as a tool. Below is the part of the talk where he mentions his use of twitterfeed:

more URL shorteners

twitterfeed now supports a number of additional URL shorteners:

• idek.net
• buzzup
• chilp.it
• krz.ch
• shortna.me

Enjoy!

Hello HelloTxt!

I’m pleased to announce that twitterfeed now also supports posting to HelloTxt, so you can send your RSS updates to the many services supported by HelloTxt in one easy go.

Here’s how it works:

• when logged into twitterfeed and creating a new feed, the dropdown box at the top of the screen now contains HelloTxt as an option
• the next thing you need to do is enter your HelloTxt API user_key. If you’re already logged into HelloTxt, you can find this at http://hellotxt.com/settings/api/twitterfeed. You’ll need to enable the application in order to see your API key.
• click on the “get available services” link. This will populate a dropdown box with all the service types that you have set up in HelloTxt, so you need to have set up at least one service in HelloTxt
• select the service you want to post to (Default, Friend, or Colleague), and the rest of the options are identical to a normal feed to twitter or identica

.. and that’s pretty much everything there’s to it.

As always, please note that this is functionality is brand new, so there may be issues I haven’t foreseen. If you do come across any problems, or have any suggestions to improve the twitterfeed/HelloTxt integration, please let me know at http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed