If your Twitter feed is beginning to replace your RSS feed, you can probably thank Mario Menti. Back in March, 2007, he created the initial prototype of Twitterfeed in London as part of a BBC developer program. Twitterfeed is a simple publishing tool which turns any RSS feed into a Twitter stream. Each feed item becomes a new Tweet consisting of the headline and a shortened link to the story or blog post. Today, 170,000 publishers are using Twitterfeed to convert 300,000 feeds into Twitter streams.
By one count, Twitterfeed is the third largest Twitter client, being used by 6.5 percent of all Twitter accounts and at one point was generating 9.2 percent of all Tweets.But it is not really a Twitter client, as investor John Borthwick of betaworks pointed out to me last night while we were riding in one of those bicycle rickshaws across Manhattan (I do not recommend this mode of transportation, we were in a hurry and there were no regular cabs available). Nobody uses Twitterfeed to consume their Twitter stream, so it is not really a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Deesktop. However, a lot of people use it to populate their own Twitter account with messages.
So many people, in fact, were pushing their feeds through the service that Menti’s one-man shop was having trouble scaling the service. About a month ago, he sold a majority stake to betaworks and The Accelerator Group (TAG), and today it is relaunching with a completely rebuilt back-end, which should improve reliability.
Working with betaworks (which includes a stable of interconnected real-time startups including TweetDeck, bit.ly, and Chartbeat), the new Twitterfeed now also includes a basic analytics dashboard which brings in bit.ly data so publishers can see how much traffic is coming to their site from Twitter. They can also compare that side-by-side with traditional Feedburner stats to see where most of their redares are coming from and which source is growing faster.
Twitterfeed is also adding more sign-in options. In addition to OpenID, it now accepts usernames and passwords from Google, AOL or Yahoo accounts. But one big drawback the service still needs to address is the lag time between a post hitting a feed and the corresponding Tweet hitting Twitter. It can still take a half an hour between those two events. When you are talking real-time, that is 30 minutes too long.
I love Twitter Feed. Big improvement from their last site.
Site is down…
I built microping.me and that is a lot quicker.
I am in the processing of moving it to app engine and oauth.
Site is down… Check proxifeed.com coming out soon.
They don’t let me retrieve my forgotten Clickpass OpenID username, which was my way to access my feeds. What to do ? Damn you Clickpass
i’m a fan of twitterfeed… good structure and architecture but a little slow overall.
Am I missing something exciting? Is it more than just a RSS-twitter connector?
No, Felix, you’re not missing anything. I personally think this sorta de-values the Twitter experience… I want to know the things that people are exited to share with their followers and take the time to post themselves, no be bombarded with everything on their RSS feed. If I wanted that, I would just subscribe to the feed in my RSS reader.
I think the bigger underlying question is “will mass-marketing and mass-promotion kill what is cool about twitter?” Perhaps some TC writers would like to write about this question. Or perhaps they already have?
Totally agree. These robot-blog-link tweets are NOT improving the experience. It’s basically cluttering up an otherwise nifty experience. If you want to point me to your blog, take the time to tweet it yourself.
This is great!
I’ve always enjoyed using Twitterfeed and this makes it even better.
Love Twitterfeed ..!!
We used Twitterfeed everyday. Good to hear about its new analytics capabilities. Will make sure to check this out soon.
Checking Twitterfeed
Thanks for the update, will check out Twitterfeed.
BTW, there is a typo at “where most of their REDARES are coming from”.
I never thought I would, but I haven’t touched my rss feeds in quite a while. I am actually reading a lot of stuff through twitter, often combined with yahoo pipes to filter out the good stuff.
If you blog, twitterfeed is a ‘no-brainer’
I prefer http://RSS2twitter.com/ it has Analytics and it’s much more reliable
I believe that with the flood of information now available, it would be really hard to collate them logically. An endeavor worth appreciating anyhow.
Twitterfeed hadn’t been reliable for a long while.
Hoping it keeps working with all this stats jazz.
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check out hootsuite. it does the same thing.
I was a big time TwitterFeed user with the first version but this new updated version is terrible.
It’s slow, broken half of the time, logs me out occasionally, won’t let me update feed, and now won’t let me delete feeds!
TwiterFeed I loved your service before but fix the new one asap because I doubt I’m the only one experiencing difficulties.
I must say that twitterfeed made my life much easier. As I am a tech savvy and can use it to post latest tech news without my presence. Hat offs to twitterfeed.
Hi,
I agree with you. It is true that twitterfeed has improved a lot compared to what it was earlier. Its a very good way to publish your feed to Twitter.
There is another article that I came across which says that twitterfeed is killing twittersearch.
http://www.webg...search.php?p=p2
Would recommend you to read it once.
Joe