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Tracking Twitter With Twitterfeed
September 1st, 2008 by (jeff)isageek

twitterfeed

one thing I have really been missing on twitter these days has been the ‘track’ feature which would let you get any tweets that matched a string you wanted to follow.  For myself one I would track was ‘@jeffisageek’.  The sad news though is twitter has shut off the track feature for the time being.

For myself I created a little work around that I figured I would share with everyone.  It involves using twitter, rss feeds, and the service twitterfeed which if you are not familiar with allows you to add any rss feed to your twitter account and broadcast those contents like your rss feed to your blog or your flickr stream or whatever the case may be.  Below are the steps I took to get everything up and running.

1 create a search with twitter search (summize) – I did a search for ‘@jeffisageek’ in twitter search aka summize and grabbed the rss feed for that.

2 create a new twitter account – this is a private account that uses twitterfeed to grab my rss feed from the twitter search that is searching for ‘@jeffisageek’

3 create a twitterfeed – I use twitterfeed to post when i have a new blog post or a new flickr pic from my mobile device.  I added a new feed which polls the rss feed I created with twitter search and then posts the message on my new private twitter feed.

4 subscribe to my new twitter account – now i subscribe to the private twitter account i created which is posting the results from the twitterfeed I created.

The outcome is I get a twitter message from my new private twitter account when there is a new rss entry added to the rss feed of the twitter search.

now the only bad thing with this is I do not get who the message is from in the tweet but there is a tinyurl pointing to the twitter message on twitter itself which i can pull up on my mobile browser to see who is sending me an @ message.

Like I said probably not the greatest way to do things…and if you have another way you get all your @ messages to your mobile device via sms please do let me know.  But for now this is my system (hehe)




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  • Nice Twitter tip. Thanks Jeff.
  • This is definitely a complementary service to Twitter.
  • Holy wow, Jeff! I hope your Twitter folks appreciate you, and the consideration you put into tracking replies! I try to track via Hahlo and Twitterfox, but it's still hard to maintain... and I don't even have that many Twitter friends. Actually, I'm a Twitter failure since I try to re-direct everyone to FriendFeed LOL.

    I see a lot of people using Twhirl / Tweetdeck / Posty... Have you considered those options?
  • hey mona

    yeah those are all options and I use stuff like that for on my computer but I was looking for an option on my mobile and using sms since i do most of my twittering directly from my phone.
  • Jeff: Have you tried Hahlo?
  • Instead of using Twitterfeed, I skip that step and bring it straight into FriendFeed. Without it, I would've missed all of my Twitter @replies especially when Twitter doesn't classify a tweet as a reply if the @username isn't at the start of the tweet.
  • Brilliant. I had to check my google reader constantly. So do I need a new email account to create a new twitter account? I first did the twitter search because I had missed a few things for me because @chrisculbertson was not at the beginning so it was not in my 'replies' tab.

    Thanks.
  • hey chris! yeah you have to have a new email address for the new twitter feed. glad you liked my little work around.
  • I'll have to explore this option, as it's been something I've been looking at for quite some time. Derek's Tweenky can do a "track" to email via search terms as well, but it also manages to grab the originating twitter's name. You can simply have it email your phone's email address (see provider for format).

    Only downfalls to this are that the service is still very beta, and "Tweenky track for 'searchterm" appears as both the subject and in the body, so there is little room for the actual message in the SMS.

    The originating poster missing is because Summize searches only include this information as a link in their feeds. While not as reliable, you can probably subscribe directly to your Twitter replies tab (providing you can utilize a username/password.). While it may miss @s in the middle of a tweet, you'd at least get the Twitter handle.
  • Thanks Jeff. Thanks Ed, too. I will play around with this some. I wish there were some way to have your mobile device for multiple accounts on twitter. I obviously understand why, but it would make some things much easier on me. haha
  • Twitterfeed is a great little service. One of my favorite feeds to follow on twitter is The Onion's. Their headlines are so funny, and are always under 140 characters.
  • Twitter feed is a perfect addon for all Twitter enthusiasts.
  • It is a great addon for all Twitter enthusiasts. Btw thanks for the tips.
  • Interesting post. Appreciate it as I have seen something new now.
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