Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [53]
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.
APIs: The key to twittering off of Twitter.com
An application programming interface (API) is basically a set of programming instructions and standards that developers can use to access a software application such as Twitter. When