How do you use Twitter in the newsroom?

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Permalink Reply by Zac Echola on February 23, 2008 at 4:01pm

But that's exactly what RSS is there for! Every twitter page has an RSS feed that you can use this service (but there are many other RSS to email services out there) to route the information into an email account. Obviously, if you're going to to have many twitter accounts, you're going to want to combine all those feeds into one feed before you send it out to your email. I prefer Yahoo! Pipes for this task, but it's got a bit of a learning curve. This is an excellent series on using Pipes.

And here's the short version (from Read/Write Web's How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet post):

1. Select "Sources", then "Fetch Feed" to add your RSS feeds one at a time.
2. Select "Operator", then "Union" to insert the command to splice them all together.
3. Drag and drop connections between all the little dots, down to "Union" and then Run That Pipe! Select output via "other" and RSS and you've got your spliced feed.

The nice thing about the Pipes solution is that you can add and remove any twitter feeds at any time.

I'd set up a group account on your email server, something like @newsroom-updates and that's where this RSS FWD would point to. This sounds much more complicated than it is though. Mostly a lot of copy and pasting. It shouldn't take you more than a couple of hours max to set up.

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Permalink Reply by Zac Echola on February 23, 2008 at 4:10pm

I should note that there will probably be some delays from text message to email as you're hoping through a few services here.

The ideal solution would be to have everybody turn on SMS alerts and just get text messages from everyone they're following.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Deal on February 24, 2008 at 2:01am

Thanks for pointing me at Pipes... made for an easy solution except that some of the twitter accounts (probably most of them) are private and I couldn't figure out how to get past that in pipes.

But needless to say Pipes is very cool and I almost immediately started playing around with that and almost forgot why I was there in the first place.

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Permalink Reply by Shawn Smith on March 7, 2008 at 8:47am

just realized my previous reply was garbage on this topic, sorry for not reading the discussion thoroughly before replying!

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Permalink Reply by Zac Echola on March 7, 2008 at 5:36pm

I should also mention that I occasionally use Twitter to track certain keywords. Today, I've been following the Ken Stern ouster and have come across some interesting links and posts. Terraminds has a good twitter search, but I also use the native tracking system (type "track keyword(s)" in IM or text and every instance of of that keyword will be fed to you.

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