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Dear twitterfeeders,
it gives me great pleasure to share this piece of news with all of you - Twitterfeed is now part of Bitly! Bitly helps you collect, organize, shorten and share links, which makes Twitterfeed a natural and good fit for the bitly ecosystem. I’m particularly pleased that I’ll be able to work with the excellent group of people there - the technical and entrepreneurial talent at Bitly is second to none!
I myself will continue to be involved in Twitterfeed much as before, except now as part of Bitly. In the short term, nothing dramatic will change, while we are looking into areas where closer co-operation and development make sense.
Not many of you may know this, but I started Twitterfeed in 2007 as a side project, with no expectations that I would one day be in a position to write a blog post like this. This is of course thanks to all of you, who have stayed with us through the more difficult days when we struggled with growing pains, and scaling a service that wasn’t initially designed to be used by a million users and more.
So, thanks to you all, and thank you to Saul and Robin Klein from TAG, and John Borthwick and Andy Weissman at Betaworks, without whose support and encouragement Twitterfeed wouldn’t have developed into what it is today. This is now starting to sound like an Oscars acceptance speech, so I’ll stop and spare you the tears. As a wise man once said, “There is nothing so stable as change”. Extra points if you know who said that without googling it.
Yours,
Mario
Founder, twitterfeed.com (& now a bit of Bitly)
Many of you have asked for this, and as of today, you can use twitterfeed to post your content directly to LinkedIn as well as Twitter and Facebook.
To add LinkedIn as a destination for your posts, simple edit your feed in the twitterfeed dashboard, and under “Step 2” you’ll now see LinkedIn listed under “Available Services”. Click on the “LinkedIn” link under “Available Services”, then authenticate your LinkedIn account (this takes you to the LinkedIn site, where you’re asked to give us permission to post to your account). Once you’re returned to twitterfeed, make sure you click “Create Service”, which will activate the service, and any new posts from your feed should now be posted to LinkedIn as well as the existing services you’ve previously set up.
As ever, please let us know at support@twitterfeed.com if you come across any problems with this new functionality.
We hope you find this useful - enjoy!
gig alerts on twitter, using twitterfeed and songkick -
One for the gig-goers out there: our founder Mario, who happens to be a big music fan, recently wrote this little how-to guide to set up your own concert alerts on twitter, using twitterfeed in combination with the excellent Songkick service.
A little Friday present from your nice Twitterfeed folks:
We now support geo-tagging in feeds when posting to twitter. If you have a feed that contains geo information, all you need to do is to ensure that the twitter account you’re posting to has location enabled - to do that, go to http://twitter.com, and under the “Settings”, make sure the “Add a location to your tweets” checkbox is checked.
If the items in your feed contain geolocation info, we then automatically geo-tag the tweets we post to your twitter account. We currently support both “geo:lat”/”geo:long” and “georss:point” elements.
As ever, this is very new, so please let us know if you find any problems with it - email support@twitterfeed.com with details of any issues you find. Similarly, we’re happy to hear of any cool uses for this new feature, so drop us a line or ping us on twitter at @twf_support anytime..
Happy Geo-Friday everyone!
This post will be of interest mostly to our users posting feeds to their Facebook accounts or pages - so if you’re only posting to Twitter and have no plans to post your content to Facebook also, you can safely ignore it.
We have today updated our Facebook Connection code to use the newer Graph API, which - in plain English - has the following advantages for you:
If you have any existing feeds set up posting to Facebook, they will continue to work, but will not take advantage of the above, so it is highly recommended you update your feeds. Updating the Facebook connection is very easy:
A final note: the thumbnail image feature is only available with normal Wall posts, not with the shorter Facebook status updates, so if you want to take advantage of this, make sure you keep the default “post title & description” (under “Advanced Settings”). If you change this to “title only”, we will post a short, text-only status update to Facebook rather than a Wall post.
We hope you like these improvements, but as ever, if you find any problems with it, let us know at support@twitterfeed.com.
Your twitterfeeders.
We’ve just deployed a small update that will fix an issue that affected some users who wanted to use a custom shortener endpoint URL that was longer than 100 characters. The limit for this has now been raised to 250 characters, which should be more than enough based on the examples we’ve seen so far.
If you have previously tried to enter a longer endpoint URL and it didn’t work due to this limitation, please edit your feed in the dashboard, and under “Advanced Settings” re-enter the custom shortener URL.
Happy custom shortening!
(And, as usual, if you have any problems with this, drop us a note at support@twitterfeed.com)
We just went live with some updates to the account management features, which now enable you to…
You’ll see these features if you click on the “account” menu at the top.
We hope you’ll find this useful!
Your twitterfeed team
There will be approx. 1 hour’s downtime today at 4pm GMT (11am EST), as part of an upgrade of our database servers. For more details nearer the time, follow @twf_support on twitter, we’ll post a notice there before we take down the service, and will notify you when we’re back.