Beware: This is only interesting for socialnetwork geeks 😉
I think I found an elegant switch from Twitter to FriendFeed while still letting Twitter know about your updates (but without any double-posting).
The Problem:
1. For whatever reasons you enjoy using FF more than Twitter. But:
– Twitter still has a huge fan base and you (the tech geek, blogger, magazine) probably have far more followers there than you have Friendfeed subscribers. So you don’t want to just “leave” and break up with Twitter altogether, loosing readers and loyal friends
– you are probably tired of either having to post short updates to both services manually (!) in order to serve both flocks
– or you already cross-post or re-post your FF stream using Twitterfeed.com to Twitter, but you don’t like to spam your followers with double entries or everything that’s been imported into your Friendfeed (and most of it doesn’t make sense in a tweet with 140 characters)
Well, I found a solution the other day that works well enough for me (thanks to Opensource Obscure and evilgenius):
1. remove the Twitter import from your FF services (and post whatever you would have tweeted before directly to FF instead of Twitter)
2. get a Twitterfeed account and set update settings to 30 minutes (YES, that seems to be the catch, I’ll come back to this in the end)
3. feed your Friendfeed RSS using the following format to Twitterfeed:
http://friendfeed.com/yourFFnicknamehere?format=atom&service=internal
This way only original FF messages will show up in your Twitter stream. No imported stuff.
4. For bloggers: “Wait!” you ask, “how do my Twitter followers know about a new blog post now?” (without having to extra post this redundant info to FF, where it’s already showing up because you’ve imported it)
Just add another Twitter feed to Twitterfeed.com using either “blog” or “tumblr” behind “service=”.
Example for a Tumblelog:
http://friendfeed.com/yourFFnicknamehere?format=atom&service=tumblr
Example for any other blog:
http://friendfeed.com/yourFFnicknamehere?format=atom&service=blog
The result is that you never have to twit again. You’re probably more engaged in conversations on FF than you are on Twitter anyway. Still, when you “share something” or use the FF bookmarklet it’ll be tweeted to your loyal (if somewhat stubborn) followers. Except the comments. And when you wrote a new blog entry it not only shows up in FF, but in Twitter, too.
The only drawback I can see here is, that Twitterfeed’s highest frequency is 30 minutes. But wait a minute. Worst case: you finished your most excellent blog entry ever and want to let the world know instantly. But only your FF followers will get the cake that fast, Twitter might hear the news up to 30 minutes late.
First: that’s what they get for being sooo 2007 and second: nothing much changes for them anyway cause they’ve been off most of the time these days. Happy feeding!
Memories from the Future 