Combine Multiple Twitter Accounts to One: Meta-Twitter Technique
Friday, 27 February 2009
This post is in response to a question recently posed on twitter by the BBC Comic Relief team - how do you combine multiple twitter feeds so they appear in one account?
Comic Relief wanted all the RedNose Day Celebs taking part to have their tweets appear at one account: @RedNoseClimb The below method uses RSS from the twitter account you are looking to combine, adding them together using Google Reader (although any feed aggregator will do such as FriendFeed). The beauty of using RSS is that you do not need the twitter log in accounts for each account, which means you can create super twitter feeds of your favourites.
It works as follows:
1) Take the RSS feed from the twitter account you wish to combine - you don't need the login details, just for the account to be unprotected:
Its in the bottom right hand corner underneath the followers on most profiles.
2) Subscribe to that RSS feed in Google Reader
3) Put that feed into a folder. Make it a public folder (Manage Subscriptions > Folders and Tags > Public)
4) Repeat for all twitter feeds you want to follow.
5) Now copy the RSS feed from the public page for that folder and feed it into twitterfeed.com or similar, into the twitter account you wish to update. Twitterfeed simply parses the RSS feed and makes it friendly for twitter.
6) Now whenever any of your chosen twitter accounts update, they will come through and be shown in the twitter account you have set up.
Its not ideal in that it will only update every 30mins or so, but is effective for gathering information into "Meta-Twitter" accounts. You can then subscribe to your custom twitter feed if you don't want to follow them all manually.
However, it is very easy to add new feeds by just putting it into the appropriate Google Reader Folder
Other applications may be making a Company twitter account tweeting all its employees, a custom music channel tweeting friends Blip.fm profile, or putting your RSS reader into twitter so you don't need to sign in to see what is new.
If you want more ideas on using twitter follow @GuavaUK
Comic Relief wanted all the RedNose Day Celebs taking part to have their tweets appear at one account: @RedNoseClimb The below method uses RSS from the twitter account you are looking to combine, adding them together using Google Reader (although any feed aggregator will do such as FriendFeed). The beauty of using RSS is that you do not need the twitter log in accounts for each account, which means you can create super twitter feeds of your favourites.
It works as follows:
1) Take the RSS feed from the twitter account you wish to combine - you don't need the login details, just for the account to be unprotected:
Its in the bottom right hand corner underneath the followers on most profiles.
2) Subscribe to that RSS feed in Google Reader
3) Put that feed into a folder. Make it a public folder (Manage Subscriptions > Folders and Tags > Public)
4) Repeat for all twitter feeds you want to follow.
5) Now copy the RSS feed from the public page for that folder and feed it into twitterfeed.com or similar, into the twitter account you wish to update. Twitterfeed simply parses the RSS feed and makes it friendly for twitter.
6) Now whenever any of your chosen twitter accounts update, they will come through and be shown in the twitter account you have set up.
Its not ideal in that it will only update every 30mins or so, but is effective for gathering information into "Meta-Twitter" accounts. You can then subscribe to your custom twitter feed if you don't want to follow them all manually.
However, it is very easy to add new feeds by just putting it into the appropriate Google Reader Folder
Other applications may be making a Company twitter account tweeting all its employees, a custom music channel tweeting friends Blip.fm profile, or putting your RSS reader into twitter so you don't need to sign in to see what is new.
If you want more ideas on using twitter follow @GuavaUK
Friendfeed can combine twitter accounts and is super fast... (Google Reader is not compared to Friendfeed) Then I guess that if you really need to push the combined feed to twitter, you can do it with twitterfeed. There's a Friendfeed2twitter feature but I'm not sure how it would work in this particular case.
Posted by: Philippe | Thursday, 05 March 2009 at 08:13 AM
Interesting idea. I was trying to think of a way to do this and I saw somebody tweet about this article. This will definitely work for my needs as I'm not worried and a 30min dealy or so. Thanks
Posted by: Frank Morgan | Monday, 09 March 2009 at 04:15 AM
Twitter's RSS feeds seem to have only the last 20 tweets.
If you have a prolific tweeter (at more than 20 tweets an hour) then Google Reader will miss some of those tweets since it only refreshes so often.
Posted by: Ganesh | Monday, 09 March 2009 at 05:20 AM
@Ganesh.
Let me ask one question, who tweets more than 20 times an hour? I know the kids of today are getting into twitter in a big way, (this year it is expected to grow by at least 50%) but i still cant see anyone tweeting more than 20 times in an hour!
Posted by: gaz-j | Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 08:39 AM
@Ganesh @Philippe Yep Friendfeed will do a similar service, or indeed any RSS aggrgator service, such as my favourite SecondBrain.com - I chose Google Reader however since its one of the most popular and adding feeds is super easy - for advanced Twitterer's you may want to try Yahoo! Pipes to give you even more customisation over which tweets appear.
Posted by: MarkeD | Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 10:42 AM
Yes, there are people who tweet more than 20 times in an hour. Trust me, I know. I've been unfortunate enough to follow a few of those.
I liked the post's tip. The "super Twitter feed" concept looks very attractive; you can find many uses for it if you're creative. I'll give it a try.
Posted by: Karen | Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 10:43 AM
It looks as though the various tweets don't show the original twitterer's name. I'm looking to combine multiple accounts into one, but I'd like the subscribers of that meta-channel to see the names of the original twitterers. Is that possible?
Posted by: @kimtastic | Monday, 13 April 2009 at 08:07 PM
@kimtastic: you can add these names in twitterfeed, there's a prefix field
Posted by: bart | Thursday, 16 April 2009 at 05:32 PM
I set this up with the group blog Idea Lab. But for some reason the new feed in Twitter seems to repeat the author name and tweet twice when they are short enough. Check it out:
http://twitter.com/PBSIdeaLab
Seems like something in Google Reader that does that with Twitter feeds. Know any way to fix that?
Thanks!
Mark
Posted by: Mark Glaser | Saturday, 13 June 2009 at 01:21 AM
@PBSIdeaLAb Sorry just saw your blog comment - in twitter feed option "Post Content" deselect "title and description"
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