Twitterfeed

We’ve just come across this very nice video on how to use...

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 06:30:30 -0500

We’ve just come across this very nice video on how to use Twitterfeed by @katiefreiling - thanks to @schurpf for the heads-up! Hope it will be of use to some of you ;)

I, for one, welcome our new pufferfish overlords

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:19:21 -0400

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)

Publish your updates directly to LinkedIn

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:58:00 -0400

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

Fri, 13 May 2011 02:25:30 -0400

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.

now with added geo-rss goodness!

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:34:13 -0400

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!

New & improved Facebook posts

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:01:00 -0400

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:

the “Connect with Facebook” dialog is much simpler, and less prone to problems
by default, posts to Facebook now include a thumbnail image, something many of you have asked for

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:

click on “edit” next to the feed you want to update
Under “Step 2”, click on the active “Facebook” account/link
you should see a note saying your Facebook connection is out of date - to update, just click “Connect with Facebook” again
Once connected, if you’re the admin of one or more pages, you will also see a dropdown list of pages. If you select one of these pages, we will post to that page, rather than to your own account.
Click “Update service” and “All done” on the next page, and your Facebook connection is up to date.

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.

fix for longer custom URL shortener strings

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:57:00 -0500

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)

new account management features

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:33:00 -0500

We just went live with some updates to the account management features, which now enable you to…

update the email address you are using to sign in to twitterfeed
assign an email address to an existing OpenID account - this then lets you sign in to your twitterfeed account via email/password as well as OpenID
delete your account entirely (not that you would ever seriously consider this option, of course!)

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

brief downtime today for server upgrade

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 05:39:40 -0500

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.

Nice article about setting up Twitterfeed on TheNextWeb

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:50:29 -0500

Nice article about setting up Twitterfeed on TheNextWeb

bit.ly Pro custom domains in dashboard

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:07:00 -0500

This is one for those of you who are using bit.ly Pro with your own short domain:

We’ve just deployed a small change to the twitterfeed dashboard that fixes the display of click counts for these custom domains. So you’ll now get the same information regardless of whether you’re using bit.ly or your own bit.ly Pro domain.

Happy bitlying and twitterfeeding!

Six Ways to Get More Exposure for Your Blog

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 19:02:00 -0500

Six Ways to Get More Exposure for Your Blog:

Nice shout out for Twitterfeed in Entrepreneur mag! Check it out.

new status page, and a dedicated support account on twitter

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 07:46:11 -0500

Greetings from your twitterfeed team!

We’ve recently created a specific status blog at http://status.twitterfeed.com where we post any temporary issues affecting our service (and the service of related third parties like twitter, Facebook, etc.). Please feel free to follow it!

On twitter, in addition to our main twitterfeed account at @twfeed, we have now also set up a dedicated support account at @twf_support. The aim is to free up the main account for non-support related things like general news and updates. We will still monitor both accounts for mentions and DMs, but you’ll start seeing more replies coming from the @twf_support account rather than the main one.

Using Twitter to get found faster by search engines!

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 01:11:48 -0500

Using Twitter to get found faster by search engines!:

The data concludes that creating your new product or post with internal links along with a tweet that gets 3 or more RTs, will help in increasing the time and rate at which they get indexed.

Experiencing elevated error rates

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:09:31 -0500

twitterstatus:

You may experience some problems and errors when using the site. We are aware of the problem and are taking action.

How to post from Twitter to Facebook and vice-versa using Twitterfeed

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:56:00 -0400

Happy Tuesday!

Everyone knows that you can use Twitterfeed to feed your blog to Facebook and Twitter. But did you know that you can also use Twitterfeed to feed your Facebook posts to Twitter and to feed your Twitter posts to Facebook?

It’s simple! To go from Twitter to Facebook, just use your Twitter page URL as your blog URL, ie. to post from the twfeed account use this as your blog URL:

http://twitter.com/twfeed

(Note: if you’re on #newtwitter, remove the #! from the URL, ie. use http://twitter.com/twfeed and not http://twitter.com/#!/twfeed)

With the new simplified sign up, that’s all you need - Twitterfeed will automatically discover your RSS feed URL, and you can then connect that feed to the Facebook service.

To post from Facebook to Twitter is a bit more complicated.

First, click on http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and grab your facebook id and key from the RSS feed URL.

Then substitute your facebook id and key in the facebook status feed, it should look like this:

http://www.new.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=[your_facebook_id]&viewer=[your_facebook_id]&key=[your_internal_key]&format=rss20

Use that as your feed URL and as usual, connect that to your Twitter account!

Hat tip: Kristi Barrow

Feature Friday #4 (Halloween edition): Simplified sign up and an update on our Facebook issues

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:55:00 -0400

Good afternoon, hope you all had a happy halloween!

It was a dark and stormy Friday and while the rest of the world was busy dressing up and carving pumpkins, we quietly worked on adding the ability to sign up using your blog URL! That’s right, you don’t need to go hunting for your feed URL anymore, if you give us your blog or website URL, we will automatically try to find and validate your feed URL. Of course, if you already know your RSS feed URL you should use that. Please try it out and let us know how it works!

In other news, as we indicated last week, we’re having continued trouble posting to some Facebook Pages (not all pages and users are affected, but if you’re one of the affected users please accept our apologies!). The situation is outside our control till Facebook rolls out a fix, we’re in contact with them and will update you guys once they have a resolution in place. If you are one of the affected users, please write to us at support@twitterfeed.com and we will make sure we notify you when the issue is fixed.

That is all for this week, see you on the other side!

UPDATE: Facebook issues appear to be fixed, we’ve tested this locally and would like to encourage you to log in and test it yourself as well. More here: http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=13185

UPDATE 2: If you’re still having trouble check out our GetSatisfaction forum for how to fix: http://bit.ly/dsOjci

Temporary problem posting to Facebook Pages

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:29:04 -0400

As many of you Facebookfeeders have probably noticed, there have been problems with us posting to Facebook Pages during the last day or so. We’ve investigated this issue, and it appears to be caused by a bug in the Facebook streaming API, related to extended permissions (these are the kind of permissions you need to post to a Fan Page rather than your own Profile wall).

What this means in practice is that many if not all of these extended permissions have somehow been lost at the Facebook end, and we get an error back when trying to post to your pages, saying (incorrectly) that you don’t have permission to post to that page. We then assume that you indeed don’t have these permissions, and set the feed to inactive. Note that posting to your Profile wall, rather than to a Page, is not affected by this issue, and should continue to work.

We’ve been in touch with a number of people from different companies, including Facebook themselves, and from what we can tell Facebook are actively working on a solution to this issue - it’s an issue that doesn’t only affect twitterfeed, but many other tools posting to Facebook Pages.

Rest assured that as soon as the bug is solved, we will re-activate any feeds that have been affected by this issue since yesterday. We will post an update here and on twitter once we’re confident that things are working again and we have re-activated the feeds. If for some reason your problems continue after that, the best thing to do is to edit the feed in the twitterfeed dashboard, and make sure it’s set to active, and (to be on the safe side) re-authorise it through the Facebook button under “Step 2”.

Oh, and if you’re really interested in the gory details, here’s a link to the Facebook bug page: http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=13206

Apologies for these issues, fingers crossed that Facebook will push out a fix for this soon!

Feature Friday #3 brings Custom URL shortening and some exciting news!

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:59:00 -0400

Greetings, earthlings!

It’s been a busy week here at Twitterfeed. I’m happy to announce that we crossed a major milestone yesterday and are now publishing content from more than 1.6 million feeds to over 2 million Twitter, Facebook, HelloTxt and StatusNet endpoints! We’re very excited about this and are continuing to work on our performance improvements to deal with all this growth and bring you a more reliable service.

As part of our continuing feature friday hackathons, we now have custom URL shortening available to all our users. In order to use it, just edit your feed and in “Advanced Settings” chose “Custom” from the “Shorten link through” drop down, make sure to add the endpoint for your favorite shortener. We only support shorteners that respond with plaintext shortened URLs as of right now.

In order to use a new shortener, say su.pr, all you need to do is put the following link in your custom endpoint field:

http://su.pr/api/simpleshorten?url=%@

The %@ will be replaced with the URL to be shortened.

Similarly, for j.mp put the following in your custom endpoint field:

http://api.j.mp/v3/shorten?login=[YOUR_LOGIN_HERE]&apiKey=[YOUR_API_KEY_HERE]&longUrl=%@&format=txt

Make sure to replace [YOUR_LOGIN_HERE] and [YOUR_API_KEY_HERE] with your j.mp login and API key.

More details can be found here. More custom shortener endpoints can be found here: http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed/topics/endpoints_for_custom_shorteners

We also have another exciting partnership in the works and will have more info on that for you soon!

As always, happy publishin’!

Feature Friday #2 and a new way to reach support!

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:52:00 -0400

In the continued spirit of bringing you new trinkets and goodies to play with, we sat down for Feature Friday #2 last week and are glad to announce “Exclude Filters”.

As you may know, Twitterfeed allows you to filter your posts by keywords (click on Edit feed and then Advanced Settings at the bottom). What this means is that till today, you’ve been able to tell Twitterfeed to only post certain posts that contain particular keywords.

Starting today, you can tell twitterfeed to not posts certain posts that contain a particular keyword. Confused? Let me explain with an example.

Let’s say you want to never post items that talk about Apple from your blog to Twitter or Facebook. All you have to do is:

1) Click on edit your feed

2) Click on advanced settings (towards the bottom)

3) Scroll all the way to the bottom to the “Keyword Filter” section

4) Check the box marked: Filter your posts (unless it is already checked, of course)

5) Add the word you want to use to exclude posts, prefixed by

--

(that’s two dashes). So, to exclude posts with the word Apple in them, add

--apple

6) Click Continue to step 2 and then All Done on the next page

That’s it! Now every time you post an item with the word apple in the title or the body, Twitterfeed will ignore that post.

This is live and ready for you to use right now! So, we’d like to encourage you to take advantage of this feature and report back on what you think!

Along with our feature friday awesomeness, we’d also like to introduce our new support email address. We love the GetSatisfaction forums, but sometimes you need to send us more information that may not be relevant to everyone else, so you can now email: support@twitterfeed.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible!

And that concludes this post, adios muchachos!