Warning: Nerdy things ahead.
Warning: Ego-stroking ahead.
I’m smart as hell. So smart, in fact, that I sometimes surprise myself. Not too surprised, though. I’m smart enough to see it coming.
I’ve had a facebook fan page for a while, as well as a group fan page for C&H. I also just started a twitter for myself and a group twitter for Explosm. Years behind, I know, but now that I have one I want to sync the twitter accounts to their respective facebook pages, so that tweets also show up as facebook status messages. Easier said than done.
There are a few apps out there that make this possible. Sort of. Most of the apps are made to update your personal profile only and not fan/business/group pages. Those that say they can, well they can’t. Except one, Selective Twitter Status. It works for your personal profile as well as pages, but with a catch: it forces you to end every tweet with a #fb hash code to include it in facebook. This is nice and all, but I don’t want to filter anything except @replies.
Thus began the relatively simple yet arduous task of multiple twitter accounts, feed-cloning and my first foray into the wonder that is Yahoo Pipes. It’s a bit of a messy hack, but it gets the job done!
Step 1. Tweet something!
The street between Twitterville and Facebook Ln. is, sadly, a one way street. Getting your tweets to show up in facebook is easy enough, but getting facebook status updates into twitter is depressingly impossible. Why? Probably because facebook is desperately holding onto what little grasp of quick-text-based-updates they have. Or maybe it’s penis envy. Who knows.
Step 2. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Yahoo Pipes is pretty awesome: easy to setup, visual modification for dynamic content. Without delving too much into how it works, basically Yahoo Pipes lets us take a pre-existing RSS feed, manipulate the data and export it back out as a new feed.
For our pipe, we’ll be starting with our personal twitter rss feed, which can be found at the bottom of the right column on our personal twitter page. My own rss link is:
https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/28409658.rss
Your’s should look exactly like this, except that long number near the end will be different. Note: you’ll have to change the link from https:// to http:// to make this work. Now Pipes comes into play. Our pipe will do three specific things before exporting our new feed:
- Filter out @replies: Facebook doesn’t need any of that, but it’s still in our feeds. So filter out any message that contains an @ character.
- Remove your twitter name: In the feed, every entry is prefixed by “yourtwittername: ” and we don’t want that in our cloned account. SO get rid of it!
- Hash it out: Our fancy pants facebook app requires every tweet that gets included to end with #fb, so append that onto the ends of our feed’s title entires.
Step 3. Start a dummy twitter account.
The facebook application that updates our status gets it’s information straight from a Twitter account. Since our twitter needed some formatting first, it’s unable to be the source from the app. So, we make a new blank account that will act as a surrogate twitter. Kinda kinky.
Step 4. Please do not feed the Twitters.
To get our newly formatted data into our surrogate twitter, we use a turkey baster. Or Twitterfeed. Whichever you prefer. We take our RSS feed from Yahoo Pipes, plug it into our new twitter clone account and let it do it’s thing. Note: it somestimes takes a while for it to get going. And it only aggregates new tweets, so get posting.
Step 5. Set up the facebook app.
Selective Twitter Status, our facebook app (and the main magic behind this whole thing), needs to be set up in order for this to update correctly. Once you’ve added the application, the setup is relatively simple. For your profile, leave the username field empty (unless you also want your personal page updated). For your pages, just pick the page you want to update and enter your new clone Twitter username.
Hit “Save Changes,” wait for the page to reload and then click the permissions link. Go through and give the app permission to update your status and you’re all done!
And hey, while you’re dicking around with Twitter, you should totally follow me.
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