Nearly all bloggers have a Twitter profile or, at least, they should have one.
It’s one of those sharing ideas that drives Twitter, ensuring that as a blogger you’re not writing in the total dark and hope for someone to stumble upon your blog.
It makes sense to launch a tool like the new social media startup, Twitterlive.net, that officially presented itself to the world via a press release today.
The tool makes sure that your blog posts are automatically fed into your Twitter account, especially useful if you have more than one blog to manage!
To quote from the press release: “Having an active presence on social-media networks has become a very important goal of any blogger or publisher and the micro blogging service Twitter has become the main player in this area. As a result, submitting blog entries or published stories to Twitter is vital in order to keep in contact with readers and increase the traffic to a site. Twitterlive aims to simplify this process through automatic feeding of social media content to Twitter.”
My small Twitterlive.net test: not a good start
Now, of course I had to try it out, so before I started writing this post, I signed up, connected my blog to my Twitter profile, and then…got called to dinner.
While sitting at the dinner table, my mobile notified me that I had an email, it was a tweet from my development manager, and now I quote him, “Hey, don’t understand your spamming approach of re-posting things from our blog, that one you will have to explain to me someday ;)”, think I finished eating?
Looking at my Twitter timeline, and this is the thing I hate the most, Twitterlive.net had re-posted 9 blog post’s with a 2 minute interval, the oldest dated back to the 12th of January. Two words – NOT COOL! Or in Twitterish #fail!
Now the idea is OK, and Twitterlive.net might also provide a tool to monitor the click rate on your blog posts, so I am going to give it a second chance!
But honestly – guys at Twitterlive.net, fix that little beginners problem, not a good start if you want a long friendship with your users.
The author, Jonas Klit Nielsen is co-founder and Managing Partner of Mindjumpers, a Copenhagen based social media agency. Jonas works with various companies developing strategies for implementing and creating value through the use of social media. As a blogger it’s his aim to share the strategic insights and thoughts, generated through his agency’s work. You can connect with Jonas on Twitter here.
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Dear Jonas,
I’m the creator of the new twitterlive service and I’d like to make the following observations; when you create a new feed channel the system initially imports all the feed items that you have available in your Rss Feed (users wanted it that way), after that new feed items will be imported as they become available.
As for your comment that all the feed items from your test blog were published in the lapse of 2 minutes that seems very unlikely since they are published at the interval you have set on the feed channel settings page (the minimum interval is 1 minute apart).
I’ve checked all the new channels that have been created in the past two weeks and none of them have feed items published with the wrong interval. Could you please provide me with your twitter screen name so I can take a look at your twitter timeline to check the interval the feed items were published? I will be more than happy to research this issue for you.
Thanks,
Sergio
Ok, I found the feed channel you created with twitterlive.
You set an interval of 2 minutes apart.
Here is the link to the channel:
http://www.twitterlive.net/Topic.aspx?topicid=121
Notice the submitted elapsed time; you will see that each item was published with the interval you had set.
A total of 17 minutes was the difference between the first and the last of the 10 feed items published; not 2 minutes for 9 items like you mention in your article.
Thanks again for using twitterlive.
Thx Sergio for this input! I will submit it to Jonas who tested it. Very cool of you to respond so rapidly. Kudos!
Dear Sergio,
Thanks for your input and comment, and very fast I must say.
Now, what I described in my blog post where my feelings as a blogger trying out a new product.
Am I doing it right, is there enough information on twitterlive.net, is it 17 or 18 minutes etc. are of course relevant questions, and again all I can say is that you got my first impression user experience.
I am not a “all about feelings” guy, so if you choose to think, that I am all wrong, that is by all means ok with me 😉
Right now everything is working great, and I am looking forward, as I wrote in the post, to continuing trying your new product out.
Thanks for the comment and for sharing twitterlive.net
Dear Jonas,
I want to thank you for your input. It is very useful for us programmers to gather different experiences that users might have.
Every person can have a different first impression; therefore I suggest other users to try the product and let me know what do you think.
For now I have put a note on the feed creation page to warn users that the system will import all the feed items the first time a channel is created.
I will look into a way to allow users to not import any items immediately but I have notice that users want to see immediate results when the start to use a new software, but like a said everybody has their own preferences 🙂
Please contact me if you have any other suggestion.
Thanks again Jonas.
Dear Sergio,
Sounds great!
And again – thank you for making the tool, for listing and responding on input, and last but not least, acting upon input.
And again just for the record, after that little bumpy start for me, it have really worked great. It´s really a cool thing that I don´t have to think about feeding it to twitter especially because when we have more than one blog and twitter profile, and different people handling the blogs and profiles!
I promise to write a good follow up, when I get a few more valuable insigts.
Best
Jonas
Dear Jonas,
Thanks to your feedback now I have added an option to the “Add Feed” page to give the user the opportunity to decide to import or not import older feed items.
This was a great idea because not everyone wants to publish older feed items.
I have tested it and works great. I have also increased the default publish interval to 5 minutes but the user can still choose any interval they want.
The publish interval is working fine as well.
I work in the customer service business and is my pleasure to listen to my users.
Please let me know about any other issues you might have.
PD: A follow up to your post would be appreciated 🙂
Thanks again Jonas and best wishes for you too.
I just signed up for twitterlive and it looks like it’s in better shape since your post. I’ll let you know if I have any adverse reactions. Thanks for the advise.
Sandy
http://emailmarketingtricks.com
Twitterlive.net launched in mid January 2010 and after 8 months the application has evolved and matured a lot with many more cool and useful tools.
None of the problems reported in this article exist anymore but unfortunately the damage done from an article like this one to a new start up is sometimes irreparable; that’s the power of the media.
The author promised me to write a good follow up, when he got a few more valuable insights, but I never had the chance to see the new article.
All I can say to everybody is that Twitterlive.net is now the best tool available to feed your blog to twitter and other social networks via Ping.fm
Thanks