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

twitterfeed now supports posting to Ping.fm

In addition to directly posting to twitter and identica/laconica, twitterfeed now supports posting to Ping.fm, which means you can use twitterfeed and Ping.fm to send blog and other RSS updates to the many social networking services Ping.fm supports, all in one 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 ping.fm as an option
• the next thing you need to do is enter your Ping.fm application key. If you’re already logged into Ping.fm, you can find this at http://ping.fm/key/, or there’s a link called “Application Keys” on your Ping.fm dashboard
• click on the “get available methods” link. This will populate a dropdown box with all the methods that you  have set up in Ping.fm, so you need to have set up at least one service/method combination in Ping.fm
• select the method you want to post to (status, microblog, or blog), and the rest of the options are identical to a normal feed to twitter or identica
• if you selected “blog”, twitterfeed will send a long version of the content, while for “status” and “microblog” methods, messages are created and shortened in exactly the same way they are currently for twitter/identica

.. and that’s pretty much everything there’s to it. At the moment, items that are posted to twitter/identica via Ping.fm using twitterfeed will appear as “from Ping.fm” in twitter and identica – this may or may not change in future, I’m currently discussing options with the guys at Ping.fm.

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/Ping.fm integration, please let me know at http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed

zi.ma URL shortener now available

Just a quick note to say that zi.ma have now whitelisted twitterfeed, so I’ve added it to the list of URL shorteners available – as of now, it can be used in twitterfeed to shorten your links. If you provide your zi.ma username and password when editing or creating a feed in twitterfeed, this information is passed to the API, and any links shortened by twitterfeed will then be viewable (stats, etc.) when you log into your zi.ma account.

As usual, if you find problems, please report them at http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed.

no more is.gd URL shortener support

After a number of users reported that their feeds weren’t being shortened by is.gd anymore, I talked to the people at is.gd, and they have introduced API limits which make using it with twitterfeed impossible. As is.gd doesn’t want to support the levels of API usage that twitterfeed creates, they have asked for is.gd to be removed from twitterfeed. All feeds that were previously using id.gd have been reset to use tinyurl, but you can of course log into twitterfeed and select a different shortener from the ones available.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but I’m only acting for is.gd, who want their API to be used only for low volume applications.

tr.im added to twitterfeed as available URL shortener

Following on from my previous post about additional URL shorteners, tr.im now have provided twitterfeed with an API key so it should be able to get past any API limits they have in place. As a result, tr.im is now available as a URL shortening option when you create or edit a feed in twitterfeed.

One  note: tr.im have asked that I only use tr.im for users which provide their username/password so the URLs are attached to their account. If you select tr.im as the shortener without providing this information when you set up a feed, twitterfeed will use an alternative URL shortener. If you do provide the tr.im user infomation (and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t, since that gives you access to all their tools), then twitterfeed will use this information when creating the tr.im short URL, and you’ll be able to track/view these URLs in your tr.im account.