Tag Archives: blog tools

Facebook to send posts to Twitter, whales to follow

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Send Facebook Status to TwitterTechCrunch revealed that Facebook will be adding a feature this week that will allow you to send your Facebook status update out as a tweet. The tweets include a link back to your status on Facebook via the new fb.me URL shortener. Read that as monster inbound traffic for Facebook.

Of particular concern will surely be the strain this will place on Twitter, as millions of users with both Facebook and Twitter accounts suddenly increase their tweet frequency. More on that from All Facebook.

Prepare to be seeing more of the Fail Whale.

All URL shortened links in MySpace status updates are marked SPAM

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MySpace thinks shortened URLs are SPAMFirst things first. If you’re still using MySpace, please find another profile based network. There are so many other good ones like Facebook, or Virb.

I’ve been doing some data piping for clients lately, especially of the “syndicate my blog updates to my social networks” flavor. Today, I discovered that if a shortened URL like those generated by bit.ly, tr.im, or is.gd) is fed into a MySpace status update, not only will MySpace re-shorten it with lnk.ms/***, but they will also redirect that link to an internal MySpace page, accusing that you’ve been reported as a spammer, phisher, or naughty hacker.

If you’ll be automatically piping status update data to MySpace, make sure you aren’t shortening links. Some social syndication services don’t have to use a link shortener, try PingVine, or disable the one in Ping.fm. At this time, Twitterfeed shortens all URLs no matter what.

For WordPress users, try cross-posting with the MySpace Crossposter plugin. This posts your blog entries also on your MySpace “blog”, instead of your status.

OR… just stop using MySpace.

Popular blog search engines and RSS tools

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I’ve compiled these helpful links for a Grady Britton PR introduction to RSS.  The following are some of the more popular resources for finding, subscribing, and processing blogs and RSS feeds.  Please feel free to add to this list by commenting.  Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb for many of these links from his presentation at the WebVisions conference.

Free RSS readers (your new custom personal newspaper!)
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NetNewsWire – Desktop based, feature rich, popular RSS reader.
reader.google.com – Web based RSS reader.  Simple and nothing fancy.  Requires a Google account.  Accessible from any computer.

Blog Search Engines
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blogsearch.google.com – Google’s blog search engine.  Search results can be subscribed to via RSS.
ask.com – Very good, non-spammy blog search.  Search results can be subscribed to via RSS.
technorati.com – Alternative blog search engine.  Search results can be subscribed to via RSS.
live.com – Microsoft’s blog search.

Social Bookmark Sites
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del.icio.us, ma.gnolia.com, digg.com – Allows you to search tags (keyword phrases) that people have assigned to stories to find the most popular stories on that topic.  Also create an account so that you can tag stories yourself. Search results can be subscribed to via RSS.

Cool RSS Tools
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zaptxt.com – Sends you an email, IM or SMS text message the moment a story is released about your keyword phrase.
summize.com – Search Twitter tweets (posts)!
snackr.net – RSS scroller for your desktop.  Like a stock ticker of your favorite feeds.
dapper.net – Scrape any dynamic site content and convert it into an RSS feed.  So nice!
aideRSS.com, Yahoo! Pipes, simplepie.org – Filter, rank, combine, and customize RSS feeds via web GUI or PHP.

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