140Char

If you’re looking to publish any RSS feeds to a Twitter account, then apparently you wouldn’t be alone in picking Twitterfeed, as it’s apparently used by nearly 350,000 publishers.

Not only was it around the first default choice, but there are a host of changes now going live to improve the service.

If you publish on a system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds (e.g. Blogger or Typepad), your new posts should be live on Twitter in a matter of moments.

It now also features the option to publish to Facebook, which makes life a little easier.

And you get better analytics – there’s now integration with both url shortner Bit.ly, and Google Analytics.

And behind the scenes there’s an improved queue management system for greater reliability.

In fact, my only complain from a personal note is that the new design and system gives a variety of methods to log-in, and for some reason I’m struggling with mine!

Twitter followers for UK national newspapers have been tracked for a while now by Malcolm Coles over at the Online Journalism Blog.

And there are some really interesting insights emerging – besides the fact that at 1,665,202 followers in total, the entire UK news industry has serious competition from the likes of Ashton Kutcher (3,777,896 followers )and Stephen Fry (794,146 followers).

Take out the @guardiantech account, which contributes 1.2 million followers, and things really don’t look brilliant in terms of scale for most accounts – it might look better if you aggregated all Times accounts, for example, but you’d still be in the low tens of thousands, and you’d still be part of a 400,000 (approx) total.

And although there’s reasonable growth, it’s again all skewed towards the Guardian Tech account, which is benefitting heavily from being included in the Suggested User List for new users.

The question is why news sources – which are proving to be pretty popular judging by their homepage statistics – are so much less attractive on Twitter?

I don’t think it’s the wrong location for finding news and information – in fact the opposite is true.

I do think there are potentially two reasons:

1. Perhaps the strength of major media news sources – which has been written about by many people – is in aggregating and providing context and insight into what’s going on, rather than attempting to ‘beat the crowd’ to the first tweet?

But I suspect it’s more likely to be:

2. If you simply plug in an RSS feed and then bugger off, you’ll never get anywhere.

It occurred to me the other day that i tend to read the blog posts from those i follow on twitter – who ‘tweet’ new articles via twitterfeed or suchlike – more often than the others in my google reader (which i check once or twice a week at the most).

Wouldn’t be good if there was a twitterfeed – that i can control – that tweets me selected blogs – from my reader – as they happen?
This would save a lot of dicking about between twitter desktop client and browser/feed widget.
Yeah, this kinda happens with friendfeed but I don’t control that – I’m not necessarily friends with most of the authors in my rss reader , whereas with a custom google reader feed into twitter, spec’d by me… is that bit more personal.

Or maybe this functionality already exists? Any thoughts?

UPDATE: I also posted this over at never get out of the boat theres been a couple of comments if you prefer to chime in over there.