Twitter provides RSS/Atom feeds of your posts; with these feeds, your posts can be easily tracked in news readers like Google Reader, monitored in aggregators like FriendFeed or SocialThing!, and cross-posted into other blog services such as Tumblr. This idea works fine, except for the fact that Twitter has been co-opted to be not only an ambient intimacy service, but also a chat service. This can create noise in other people’s view of your feed—consider the chat versus status/micro-blog updates on, for example, Adam Darowski’s blog:
Lacking context for the replies, the individual message may be hard to follow. Using Yahoo! Pipes, we can generate a clean RSS feed that can be used in FriendFeed or Tumblr. Seeing that the hashpip.es service (that filters out #hashtags from a Twitter feed) was built in part with Pipes, I built a simple pipe called Twitter Feed without Replies that anyone can parameterize and use to filter their replies. Simply visit the pipe’s information page, enter your username, and get the results as RSS (under “More options”). The main downside of the current implementation is that the feed description and title can not be parameterized as well.
Incidentally, Yahoo! Pipes were really easy to use and seem nicely designed for easy integration with other services. The above pipe took an hour to build and it was my first experience with the service. With a little more work it would probably be possible to build a pipe that parses/generates JSON, for use in programs such as the WordPress Twitter Widget, as well as RSS for feed readers. On the other hand, for those cases, it is probably easier in those cases to take Twitter JSON output and filter that directly.
Do @replies in microblogs bother you? Would you care enough to remove them?
3 Comments
It’s one of those things… @replies are awesome if you’re following both people. They’re also cool for seeing what someone else is discussing and either butting in or soaking it in.
You’re right though… Something happened on the way back tom sxsw… I got a lot more conversational with my Twitter peeps. That can be seen above, where in the past I tended to even treat @replies as mini blog posts.
Thanks to your solution, though, there are options. In fact, the Twitter Facebook app strips out @replies. I’m not going to strip them out yet, by I’m certainly going to keep an eye on my Microblog and see if @replies hurt the experience.
Seeing @replies is certainly great if you can see the whole conversation, but the API queries don’t really have a good way to do that—perhaps a multi-call API query could be combined to produce that but even then there’s the problem of protected updates and identifying conversational threads. I didn’t know about the Twitter FB app’s approach but that seems like the appropriate one to me, especially for a microblog.
However, in the general case, the Twitter community seems to want more discussion tools and I hope they’ll move in that direction.
Thanks for putting this together. I tried doing this myself with Pipes a while back but it was too much for me.
I use Twitter RSS to put recent Tweets in my blog sidebar and @replies don’t really make sense there. Definitely going to tell others about this. Thanks!