Twitter List RSS with Yahoo Pipes

Okko — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:00:32 +0000

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…

Okko in Speech » mashups

Twitter List RSS with Yahoo Pipes