Introducing my first app, Twools – RSS Feeds for Twitter Unleashed
(and a whole lot more too!)
Twitter stopped offering RSS feeds in June this year and made it much more difficult to access your data. That’s why I built Twools– a way for you to unleash your Twitter data. You shouldn’t need to be a developer or know how to write code to be able to do this– so I have tried to make this as easy as possible.
Twools is my attempt at bringing back RSS feeds and so freeing your data. I have tried my best to make this as easy as possible for everyone to use. That’s quite a task, because Twitter don’t make it easy!
You install Twools on your own website. The advantage of this is that you control the way it works– and it is not very difficult to do. You just download Twools, add your Twitter App information and upload to your website. It’s that easy. Of course, you have to have a website– and it has to run PHP. That may be a deal breaker for you. However there are a huge number of websites that use PHP– WordPress is an axample– so hopefully you’ll be fine.
What Twools Can Do
You can use Twools to back up your tweets, or automate certain tasks. You could use in conjunction with IFTTT or another app to do some cool things. For example you could:
-Cross post to LinkedIn using the #li hashtag
– Bookmark or cross post your Twitter Favorites:
– Add new followers from a certain country or location to a Twitter list
– Get a text message when a company tweets a special offer
– Add articles that you tweet using a certain app to evernote.
– Get emailed when someone mentions your brand negatively.
– Get emailed when someone links to an article on your website even if they don’t mention you.
– Add someone mentioning a keyword to a Twitter list
What Twools Gives You
At its core, Twools gives you back your RSS feeds. However, it gives you many more RSS feeds than Twitter ever gave you. In particular, Twools gives you- – Your home timeline
– User timeline (yours or another user’s)
– Your mentions
– Your favorites
– List timeline (from a list that you own)
– Direct messages received (disabled by default)
– Direct messages Sent (disabled by default)
– Twitter Search
– New followers
– New friends
You can then run filters on these feeds, to only return certain results. These are very powerful (more information in the article)
There are so many possibilities, that it might take some time to get your head round it all.
Share Twools Recipes
I’ve built in a sharing facility into Twools. This way we can all share our ideas of feed recipes with each other. Basically all this does is to share the query string that Twools uses to create the feed, but it should make it easier to share and use recipes.
Streams
RSS feeds are powerful, but sometimes you might want to have a look at the results visually in the same way you can on Twitter, TweetDeck or Hootsuite. Streams gives you this, kind of. It’s nothing fancy– and it isn’t supposed to be. It gives you a stream of the tweets with the same filters you get with the feed generator. You can then reply, favorite or retweet any of these retweets.
I use this myself quite a lot, because I find a lot of social media management tools a little lacking in filters. For example, with Twools Streams I can show the tweets from people in one of my Twitter lists excluding retweets and ones posted using a scheduling app. I also find it useful for doing a Twitter search of those people linking to an article on my blog excluding myself and ones mentioning me (since I’ll already see these in my mentions stream).
http://iag.me/socialmedia/tools/introducing-twools-your-twitter-rss-feeds-unleashed/
