Twitter from the inside out
January 4th, 2011, By Duncan Gough
It appears that I am very interested in turning services upon themselves, getting inside and pushing bits out to the sunlight. The more I use Twitter, the more I see it as only a place to discover content (over blogs, RSS feeds and Facebook, for example). That’s where the value is, and the most useful discoveries I make on Twitter are links to third-party websites. However, looking at my notes for when I first came up with this idea (in a car, en route to Wales), I habour a clear desire to leave Twitter.
My workflow for using Twitter is this – pick through the stream, load interesting-looking links in tabs, send them all to instapaper. All of which could be easily automated. So that’s what I did.
Here’s a thing which scans your twitter stream and runs the relevant links through a instapaper/readability-style parser. The result is a list of articles which I read easily enough in one place, and if I do need to know who shared the link on Twitter, then I can find my way back without too much difficulty. It took just over a week to build.
http://give-good-sunflower.heroku.com.
Sign up, try it out, see if it works for you. I’ll go back to Bliss and maybe something about the broheimification of the internet along the way.