I must confess: I am a Twitterholic! A slave to the obsession that has consumed so many participants in the present state of social media transported over the “tubes” that make up the “internets”. So while recovering from surgery to repair an abnominal epigastric hernia, my use of Twitter became more of an annoyance than while I am out driving my routes. My patience with Twitters reliability or more accurately, its lack of reliability, wore thin. I don’t claim to be an early adopter. I think I would be more accurately labeled a second wave adopter or simply put, a follower of those early adopters. Regardless, I do like to share my experiences as I try new technologies or new ways of using technologies in hopes that someone else will find it useful. After all, not everyone is connected in this current age, though we are getting closer to that reality. What then occurs is a need to manage that connectivity to a point so as to maintain a modicum of sanity so that one doesn’t experience information overload. With this last point in mind, I must confess, I would have more quickly adopted this strategy if I hadn’t felt it would overwhelm me with said data.
Sources
I’ll post the sources I used for your reference and also in the likely hood that these are more concise and easier to understand than my attempt at making this post a simple step by step so that your transition can be completed easily. Yes, I am wordy, so for simplicities sake, skip on down to the step by step following this break. Dave Slusher - who upholds the philosophy that one doesn’t need twitter and that digital life would be easier if you migrated over to Friend Feed completely. Paul Reynolds who takes a more moderate philosophy of a live and lets keep playing with the dead man in the room that brought us all together in the first place. And I would be remiss in not including Dave over at TrailerLife who joined me in this journey, participating in the experiment to try and make his digital life more manageable and also because he beat me to the punch by writing about it first. You may find his blog more direct and easier to follow.
The problem I found with the sources is that some of the links were out of date. By the time you read this the links I have posted maybe out of date as well. Thus is the state of technology, Ever evolving. Now, on to the steps..
First Step
Simply open a friend feed account if you don’t have one already. Go ahead and add services to your feed if you are so lnclined. It does have a tendency to spit these feeds out in their entirety once you add them. such as Youtube, Netflix, etc.
Second Step
Use your OpenID account to open a Twitterfeed account. Then enter in your Friend Feed atom feed into Twitterfeed and at the end of it add the &service=internal flag. This is important. I’ll explain in the next step. Your friendfeed feed should look like this http://friendfeed.com/yourusername/?format=atom&service=internal
Getting Closure
Finally you simply start posting from Friend Feed, or if you like using a service such as Ping.fm then make sure you either turn this twitterfeed off (it can be turned on and off very easily) or don’t include friend feed in your services that you post to from Ping.fm. If, and this is important to prevent double posting, you have the twitterfeed turned on then you want to remove twitter as a status service to friend feed. Otherwise you will double post to twitter.
I’ll try and keep you updated as to how it evolves.. and of course, share with me what you find and we will all keep updated as it rapidly becomes a tool that allows us to share with a greater efficiency our lifestreams with friends and big brother. After all, why not make it easier for Big Brother to see what we all are doing. Aren’t we all good citizens?
and GarageBand, Show your appreciation to the artists who provided it. go to the links provided and let them know you heard their music on the Sleeperberth Cast, and while your at it, go ahead and buy it.
