I will punch you in the snoot if you say "tweet"

[spatch]

Technology is fun as long as you know how to use it or how to twist it for your own nefarious purposes. I believe I have accomplished the latter with this thing the kids called Twitter, and suddenly we find Red Shift, his crew and even some of his nemeses (arch and otherwise) yammering on to each other and it's all very funny indeed.

The thing is, it would be nice to consolidate all the Twitter accounts (there's seven at last count) into one RSS feed which can then be syndicated on an LJ feed so that everybody can just put them on their friends list and snicker at the goings-on. Ideally the gang would also start responding to listener questions and stuff, but we're taking it one step at a time here.

So with that in mind, does anybody know of a simple way to consolidate several Twitter feeds into one? A nice aggregator would be just the thing. fancycwabs has made an RS_Followbot account which just follows the main characters, but I can't seem to find a way to grab an RSS feed of the followed accounts (and there may be interpersonal reasons why that's not quite possible now.)

Bonus points if you don't have to tag the posts as well because that just cuts into the 140-character limit and buddy, it takes work putting comedy into only 140 characters. Unless you're Dr. Alberts, who doesn't seem to have figured out yet that he keeps going over the limit and ending his messages prematurely.

No, I won't use the damn service personally, but for fictitious characters in a crazy made-up universe, it's ideal and rather appropriate. For one, neither Twitter nor the Do-Gooders themselves have a decent working business model.

OH SNAP

Comments

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

I think Splitweet does what you're thinking of.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

The followbot's actually mine; I was trying to figure out to do exactly what you're describing (also the call-and-response narrative of the RS crew gets diluted but the antics of the semifictional folks I follow in life) but I'm not powerful enough. I tried exporting the RS_followbot RSS feed to Google Reader, but it seemed buggy and didn't work.

You USED to be able to view something like http://twitter.com/fancycwabs/with_friends but now all that does is list all of your friends, instead of everything my friend and I are talking about.

Okay. I created Red Shift as an "imaginary friend" on FriendFeed comprised of all the twitter feeds from the Red Shift crew. It APPEARS to be a compendium of everybody's Twitter activity consolidated, with its own RSS feed. Check it out here. Will that work?

EDIT: Apparently not. It lists what's being said, but not the source. Dammit.

[spatch]

Ah! You're the Followbotter. I get it. Cool. I guess J. just noticed it among the Red Shift accts and added it too.

I was not allowed to view the FriendFeed you made, but judging from the edit, perhaps I won't need to. Yahoo's got some kind of crazy-ass aggregate editor called Pipes which seems to do what I want, but it's so shiny and GUI-like that I can't help but know that there's an easier way to do it.

During Arisia, all posts tagged were picked up by a nice aggregate (in my day, we called it 'grep') and shunted over to one account. It seems easy enough to accomplish, but the question is now whether or not I can just get some service to do it for me, or if I'm going to have to roll my own.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, twitter stuff with "hashtags" (a word I hate) is easy to group together.

I don't know if you can view the RSS feed without permission, but the atom feed is here.

Incidentally, I never quite completely understood your objections to Twitter, beyond obstinacy. Yeah, its "what are you doing" premise sucks, but in practice (among the folks I follow) it's a combination of a constant stream of pretty-good-to-great one-liners and local useful information. And you would be a GOD on the best-of-Twitter site favrd.

[spatch]

All these Wacky Social Networking applications are blocked at work so when I am able to write on my own time (either during breaks or at home) I prefer to write more than just 140-character bursts.

comments don't count

[pecosy.livejournal.com]

Sadly my life these days is such that 140-character updates are all I have time for.

[tikva.livejournal.com]

Y'know the entire crew of Serenity has Twitter accounts, right? :)

Oh, and so does Brodie.

[spatch]

From a Gotta Keep The Fandom Interested perspective, using in-character Twitter accounts is a great way to keep up interest in the show, as well as give folks something neat in the way of interactivity.

Plus you don't have to moderate a web board, which is what will eventually happen... I guess.

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes! And most of the cast on The West Wing. But they were far more active during the election.

There's a bit of The Dr, Martha Jones, Donna Noble, The Other Doctor and TREMAS er The Master also.

[betweenstations.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this will do a full consolidate, but http://brightkit.com/ will help you manage multiple accounts.

[sanity-clause.livejournal.com]

I made a Yahoo Pipe that does what I think you're asking for: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=Ztuvnnnp3RG_1U7O_g6H4A - you can get the RSS feed from that page.

If you have a Yahoo account you can just clone mine and take ownership of it before distributing it around.

[spatch]

Holy cats, I think this is what is needed! Thank you a zillion times over! I just cloned a copy (and when did I make my own Yahoo avatar? Wha?) and am testing a syndicated feed now on LJ. Once I'm on a browser what supports the whole Pipes thing I may change some settings around (currently the title and the body are the same, I wonder if I can just have the syndicated feed ignore the title) but we'll see. Thank you again!

Crossin' fingers...

[spatch]

Hmm.

rs_ansible seems to be up... maybe. Add at your own risk, them updates is vicious.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

You might want to run that through FeedStomper to do a daily summary.

[spatch]

Well, shit.

1. Feedstomper throws in ads. Not such a major quibble, but I want to be able to massage the data more.

2. You have to open a goddamn support ticket with LJ in order to change a syndicated feed URL. The hell?

3. I don't know what the fuck right about now.