matsu

Filtering @ replies from your Twitter feed

Twitter is simultaneously a “micro-blogging” platform and IRC 2.0 (as many people have dubbed it), meaning that it sometimes becomes a giant chat channel.  Many people (like I do) use what they write on Twitter to enhance their own blogs, or feed it (along with other sources) to services like Friendfeed.

The problem with this is that the ratio between your “original” content and replies to other Twitter users becomes very low, and these so called “@ replies” have little value for people that aren’t in on the conversation.

Continuing my love affair with Yahoo Pipes, I’ve created a really simple pipe that will fetch your non-protected Twitter feed, and filter out all the @ replies. It will also remove the “nickname: ” prefix from the start of each tweet.  Just input your twitter username on the form, run the pipe, and choose the “Get as RSS” from under “More options”, inside the “Use this Pipe” section. Feel free to clone it and improve it.

Tweeting Google Reader notes

I wanted to have a way for my Google Reader notes to be “automagically” tweeted, but not the regular shares (so I don’t flood my Twitter stream).  I don’t know if there are already other solutions for this, I made this essentially to learn a bit more about Yahoo Pipes.  It also uses twitterfeed, a very nice service which fetches a RSS stream and tweets a small blurb plus a shortened link for each item from that stream .

You’ll need:

• The URL of your Google Reader public page, it should look something like this:

  http://www.google.com/reader/shared/09549915423433150590

• Your exact author name from your Google Account page, mine is “Pedro Pinheiro”
• The Yahoo Pipe I created to filter the shares without notes, and input the previous two bits of information on the form.  Feel free to clone it into your own Pipes space and edit it/re-distribute it.
• To click on the “Get as RSS” under the “More options” button inside the “Use this pipe” box, note the URL
• To create a feed on twitterfeed – it uses OpenID, but you need to supply your Twitter username and password (yes, I know this isn’t safe, but as far as I know, Twitter doesn’t provide a safer alternative yet).

That’s it! Once the feed is activated on twitterfeed, within the specified time-interval, your Google Reader notes will automatically show up on your Twitter stream.

Filtering #Anita

Some people have been complaining about the insane amount #Anita exposure on Twitter, so I designed a Yahoo Pipe to filter out any tweets which have the word “Anita” in them. Enjoy!