TV Forum on Twitter

twitter.com/tvforumfeed

I set this up when Asa relaunched TV Forum earlier this year, taking advantage of the addition of RSS feeds. Asa does know about this, and he has log-in details, passwords etc.

Checking up on it, it wasn't really working. It was originally set up to tweet the thread title, and fill up the remaining 140 characters with the reply to that thread. Up to five replies from that forum every 30 minutes.

This meant though that most tweets (140 characters max) were taken up by the thread title, and not much of the content of the reply. Messy, complicated, and a pain to follow.

So I've update it so it will still show the latest replies five replies (twitterfeeds constraints, not mine) in the past 30mins from each forum, prefixed with the said forum name (not thread title) leaving more room for the actual comment in reply to a thread.

Precisely what Twitter is all about.

You will know when the new system kicks in tonight as URLs to the said reply will be bit.ly, and not rly.cc

I'm also thinking about introducing some personal tweeting, @replying etc, but this is an idea and consultation with Asa comes first.

I want this to be as easy and simple for followers as possible, with no work for Asa. However good suggestions, I'm reluctant to take up his time with fiddling what content rss/xml feeds have.

Apart from that, any feedback would be gratefully appreciated.

Don't forget that TV Forum's sister site is on Twitter. She can be found @metropol247, and is 100% human, not RSS, operated.

To follow TV Forum on Twitter, click here.

Its all very clever but I'm afraid my first thought has to be, what's the point? As you say, TV Forum already has an RSS feed. Why take that and limit it to the first 140 charactors?

It's superb, never understood RSS feeds, so it's a good alternative.

True, Dave, but for a lot of people like Chris above, Twitter is a snappy alternative.

I've lost track of the number of sites using Twitterfeed to get their RSS on Twitter.

Nearly 7000 are follow BBC Politics updates using Twitter. Say 50% of those are spammers, that still leaves 3500 who use Twitter as an (albeit character limited) source of RSS feeds.

For thousands of people, it's obviously very useful/preferable.

I'm happy to make TV Forum's RSS feeds to people on Twitter.

Of course, for those who want to, alternative software and some browsers can bring RSS content to them without a 140 character cap.

Nice feed I like it. 5/5

What the heck's the point of marking this out of 5? The trolls need to GO!

That's harsh I was only saying I think it's good.

I started following, gave up after about 10 minutes as it was ruining my Twitter feed.

Jon, It really depends on how many people you are following, and how often they tweet. I used to have exactly the same problem with the @breakingnews twitter, but it became less of an issue when I started following more people.

It's also very clear that you don't use Twitter on a hourly, let alone daily basis. 13 tweets since April 16th.

Also I use TweetDeck, so certain things are grouped. News, politics etc, making it easier to follow friends.

Jammy, glad you're enjoying it.

Twitter Lists

Although still in Beta testing, an increasing number of tweeters have the new 'list' function.

One of the lists I'm creating for @tvforumfeed is TV Forumers! If you want to be included, please PM me with your Twitter username and I'll happily include you in the list.