Sending links from Twitter to Google Reader made easy

Apr 9

How-To Guides David 13 Comments
bookmarking, bookmarks, google, links, reader, RSS, Twitter

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Unite Twitter & Google Reader with a click of the star

The Problem

For writers, most links come from either Google Reader or Twitter these days. In the case of Google Reader, one can easily save things for later by adding a star. However, saving links from your Twitter timeline requires some sort of bookmarking system (e.g. Delicious, Instapaper or Packrati.us). This gives the writer two sets of links to keep up with, wouldn’t it be better if everything were in one place?

The Solution

Twitter has its own starring system, “Favourite Tweets”, and this category has its own RSS feed too. Therefore, a very simple way to get selected links from a Twitter timeline to Google Reader is to just subscribe to the Favourite Tweets RSS feed. This is done by going to your favourite tweet page, (e.g. http://twitter.com/davidgilson/favorites), and clicking on the RSS icon in the browser address bar.

There are two speed bumps though. First, it can take Google Reader a while to pick up updates to the favourite tweets RSS feed. Second, to keep all ‘read later‘ material under Google Reader’s starred items list, all incoming twitter links will need to be starred manually.

Subscribing to Twitter favourites in Google Reader

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13 Comments (+add yours?)

Andy Stannard
Sep 21, 2010 @ 16:14:15

Will give that a try sounds like a good idea!

Reply
Iain Mercer
Dec 17, 2010 @ 12:33:41

Hi David

When you say “clicking on the RSS icon in the browser address bar”, is that a Firefox thing? I’m vaguely aware that Firefox has live bookmarks, but haven’t used them (mostly use chrome) so don’t know if you can then join the dots between them and Google Reader.

Cheers
Iain

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- David
  Dec 17, 2010 @ 12:36:56
  
  Hi Iain,
  Let me know which browser you’re using and I’ll give alternate instructions.
  
  Reply
Iain Mercer
Dec 17, 2010 @ 14:10:37

Hi David

I’m using Chrome. I’ve found an extension – RSS Live Links – and it appears to have created an RSS feed: http://twitter.com/favorites/77143.rss I’ve tried adding that into GReader, but it just says “Your search did not match any feeds.” I’m hoping this is a by-product of the delay you mentioned, so I’ll give it a few hours. (It’s had 90mins so far…).

Iain

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James Whatley
Mar 22, 2011 @ 16:26:22

When you say: “Second, to keep all ‘read later‘ material under Google Reader’s starred items list, all incoming twitter links will need to be starred manually.”

Do you mean in Greader or on Twitter?

PS. This is awesome, thank you.

Reply
- David
  Mar 22, 2011 @ 18:24:30
  
  Hi James,
  Glad you’re finding this awesome! It’s my (not so) secret weapon in dealing with the fire hose of data that is my Twitter timeline!
  
  The starring manually line was referring to GReader. The things you send through from Twitter won’t be automatically starred in GReader. So if use use GReader stars as a flag for “read later”, as I do, then you’ll have to add them yourself to the Twitter favourites feed in GReader.
  
  Reply
Paul Sutton
Mar 23, 2011 @ 12:15:10

I’ve been doing this for quite a while now and it works well. But there’s a better way of saving things for later.

It’s called Instapaper: http://www.instapaper.com
It’s like a bookmarking system but you add a ‘read later’ icon to your browser toolbar and just click it everytime you come across a URL that you want to read but don’t have time. Then just go to your page when you’re ready.

Been using this for a couple of months and love it.

Reply
- David
  Mar 23, 2011 @ 12:50:42
  
  Hi Paul,
  Instapaper is ok, I’ve used it too. However, I went to my method here, because it’s completely platform agnostic, it’ll work anywhere. I mostly read Twitter on a range of different mobile devices. So I’d need Instapaper to be universally available. Whereas with using Twitter favourites, I hardly have to think about it.
  
  Reply
Nirave
Mar 23, 2011 @ 16:40:56

Thanks for all your help David, great idea

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Chris
Mar 24, 2011 @ 20:20:41

This is beautiful.

I’m actually looking for a way to do the opposite. I’m looking for a way for twitter to SLOWLY pull my shared items from GReader in to my twitter stream.

ie. Once an hour my GReader shared items list is checked and if there’s something new there it gets tweeted. Nothing new? Go back in time and tweet the one shared item previous to the most recent one already tweeted.

So I don’t necessarily want a tweet to go every time I share an article. I don’t want my twitter followers to be overloaded with shared content but instead have a steady stream of shared article be posted over the course of the day.

Anyone?

Reply
- David
  Mar 24, 2011 @ 20:50:57
  
  Hi there.
  Yes, there are a couple of ways I’m aware of!
  
  The method I currently use is TwitterFeed. This simply pipes an RSS feed to your Twitter account, optionally using your Bit.ly credentials. You can control how often it checks, and limit the number of posts it’ll tweet, and add prefix or suffix text too. The trick here is teasing out the URL of your GReader shared items RSS feed, but you can do it!
  
  The other method I’m thinking of looking at soon is a startup called Buffer. You can’t pipe an RSS feed into it AFAIK. However, you can use a chrome extension to manually share your current pages, and Buffer will tweet your pages at regular intervals, spreading out your tweets, so you don’t flood your followers.
  
  Let me know how you get on!
  Best,
  David
  
  Reply
- Leo Widrich
  Mar 24, 2011 @ 23:45:20
  
  Hi Chris and David,
  
  I have had a brief chat with David over Twitter where he outlined the issue to me. I thought the preferred solution is a twitterfeed like service that just pulls in your RSS or GoogleReader.
  
  I believe though something is needed here were a feed is filtered first and only then it is “allowed” to make its way to a twitter service which pulls that in. Please let me know if I have understood it correctly. (Sorry, I am not a very frequent GReader user: is there a difference between GoogleReader and shared items in google reader?)
  
  Just like David explained it would currently be able to do this with Buffer via the Chrome Extension (or Safari or Firefox).
  
  I have just made a quick video for you guys to show you how this would work here: http://www.screenr.com/dN3
  
  What David suggested I think is an option to add to your Buffer without the step of clicking it first. I like this a lot as I feel this could be an interesting feature which would still make sure that it’s not fully auto-generated, but save time to add exactly those items you want.
  
  Hope you can let me know what you think about that.
  
  PS: I agree a mobile version would be very handy, we want it for ourselves too and it is very high up on our list .
  
  Reply
Julie
May 16, 2011 @ 18:26:24

Thanks for the tip David. In fact, it allowed me to favourite your ME/CFS article for later reading .

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