Despite conflicting opinions on how to use Twitter, my OCD makes it very difficult not to read each and every toot that comes my way.
Because of this, I’m really starting to like Google Reader for keeping track of my timeline. When I use a dedicated Twitter app I either feel bombarded or like I’m missing tweets as they go by.
With Google Reader, each toot has a "read" status like any other blog post, so I always know which tweets I haven’t yet seen. The best part is that the read status is set and accessible whether I’m using my iPod touch or any desktop browser.
This is starting to sound like my post about Gmail and IMAP - maybe there is something to this "cloud computing" thing :)
The first version of my script that adds some Twitter functionality to Google Reader is very hackish and since I’m actually using it now as my primary means of reading Twitter, I’m thinking about cleaning it up and adding a few niceties.
- The regex pattern for matching links is too greedy - if there are more than one link in the tweet, the non-link text in between the two links is matched as well.
- There is currently no way to "favorite" a tweet - I’m pretty stingy with my favoriting, but it would be a nice feature to have nevertheless.
- To implement #2, I’m going to have to deal with authentication anyway, so I might cut out freemyfeed.com entirely and pull updates directly from Twitter using the API. This should also decrease the waiting time for tweets to appear in my feed.
I’m not sure when I’m going to have time to implement this but I took a look at the API call to ★/☆ posts and it’s pretty straightforward. If you have any other suggestions for what my script should do, let me know in the comments. Also, If you’re a Twitter purist and feel like I’m wasting my time, let me know why.