Twitter List RSS with Yahoo Pipes
This post isn’t really about speech technology, but I wanted to share that after a long time of wondering what the point was, I finally found a use for twitter: Twitter Lists. With these you can follow a group of users with a common theme, either by packing them into a list yourself or by subscribing to other users’ public lists.
However I still can’t be bothered to check twitter.com for updates, nor do I care to install another 3rd-party app for enriching my user experience. And unfortunately there is no direct way to follow a list as an RSS feed, which is how I prefer to consume information1.
Thankfully, yet another neat little Yahoo Pipes mashup comes to the rescue. Simply enter the lists’ creator’s user name and the list name, and off you go.
To add a bit of speech tech to this post, here are a few sample lists that you might find interesting:
@die_lautmaler/voicebusiness
@alisohani/machine-learning
@suellewellyn/cunning-linguists
@rachelcotterill/computational-linguistics
(And thanks to people compiling these!)
1 Interestingly, several friends have recently pointed out that they have ditched RSS for twitter as most of their regular feeds also post there. However I receive too much content via RSS that twitter won’t deliver, such as Google Alerts, and I find sorting through the twitfeed quickly becomes a chore, something you’ll still have to do when reading lists, I suppose. Also, leaving an open protocol for a commercial (if free) service seems like a step in the wrong direction…